It’s 2026. If you are still wrestling with !important overrides in Material UI or trying to hack the internal DOM structure of a Bootstrap component just to match a Figma design, you’re doing it the hard way.
The era of “fetching-on-render” and “waterfall hell” inside useEffect is officially behind us. With React 19 widely adopted in 2025, the conversation has shifted from how to use hooks to where your code actually lives.
It’s 3 AM. You’ve just shipped a feature. The logic is sound, the tests pass, but the UI feels… heavy. Input fields lag by a fraction of a second. Animations stutter on mobile devices. You check your network tab—it’s clean. You check your bundle size—it’s optimized.
If you’ve been in the React ecosystem for more than a week, you’ve heard the argument. “Redux is dead,” they said in 2018. “Context is all you need,” they claimed in 2020. Yet, here we are. It’s 2026, and the battlefield of state management has shifted from “how do we pass data” to “how do we prevent re-renders.”
It is 2025, and if you are still manually wrestling with dependency arrays in useEffect, or religiously wrapping every prop-passing arrow function in useCallback, you are working too hard.
It’s 2025. By now, Hooks have effectively won the “state management wars” for local component logic. We all know useState and useEffect like the back of our hands. But here is the uncomfortable truth: Hooks alone do not make an architecture.
The era of “janky” user interfaces is officially over. In the landscape of 2025, users—and their high-refresh-rate displays—have zero tolerance for blocked main threads. If your dashboard stutters when a user types into a filter input, you aren’t just losing frames; you’re losing trust.
If you’ve been writing React for the better part of a decade, you know the drill. You write a component, you realize a child is re-rendering unnecessarily, and you begrudgingly wrap a callback in useCallback or a calculation in useMemo. We’ve spent years micromanaging dependency arrays and fighting the “rules of hooks.”
