React Still Feels Insane And No One Is Talking About It

Let's start from the state. If you have a top-down tree of components, it's logical you'd want to pass the state top-down too. But in practice, with components very numerous and small, this is very messy, as you spend a lot of time and code just wiring the various pieces of data to get them where you need them.

This was solved by "sideloading" state into components using React hooks. I haven't heard anyone complain about this, but are you guys serious? You're saying that any component can use any piece of app state? And even worse, any component can emit a state change, that can then update in any other component.

How did this ever pass a code review? You are basically using a global variable, just with more elaborate state mutation rules. They're not even rules, but merely a ceremony, because nothing is really preventing you from mutating state from anywhere. People really think if you give something a smart name like a reducer it suddenly becomes Good Architecture™?