The trouble that React has to deal with is that JavaScript lacks good built-in support for pure functions and immutable data. Hooks are an opinionated way to make React work more like FP, and there are still gotchas because of JS’s lack of enforcement.
“Advantageous” does not necessarily mean “easier to learn.” I’d say that for people coming from OOP, FP style is certainly unfamiliar and takes more getting used to. But for a front-end program that must always receive/send data to hand wave some other systems in order to do anything useful, it makes things much, much simpler. A whole class of problems disappears. The closer it gets to (state) => UI the easier it is to reason about and debug.
I still think that Reagent, the Clojurescript wrapper for React, is the best version of React available. All of the state management is handled by CLJS itself, and the language design prevents accidental mutation. You can still mutate things where appropriate, but it is always an intentional choice. A framework like re-frame takes this even further, with similar ideas as Redux but with better language support for and enforcement of the paradigm.
