I completely agree. This may be due to my long history with Javascript and the understanding that it is fundamentally a non-class-based language with syntactic sugar that has both OOP and FP properties. But recently, so many developers come to Javascript with an OOP background and have little experience with functional programming.

React was always built around a functional programming paradigm. Its widespread use of immutable objects, its recommended approach of building pure components, its use of higher-order functions, its data-driven paradigm, all come from the FP school of thought.

I feel that using classes in React obfuscates the functional nature of React and leads developers to awkwardly try to make sense of its flow through OOP eyes. By coming at it from a FP perspective from the get-go, React makes much more sense.