Very true, while I appreciated React Hooks for making React easier for beginners by avoiding the giant can of worms that is OOP mechanics in JavaScript, they are also very magical and even more framework-specific.
That said, vanilla JS can be hard like this as well, especially as "solved" legacy issues still regularly crop up in tutorials and code-bases. Many times I remember helping newer folks with challenges they found online that seemed to them like they were testing hard computer science problems, but were more just trivia to navigate some bad design decisions of JS (eg gotcha problems on "this" / binding, IFFE, hoisting, async/promises/callbacks, to name a few)
That said, vanilla JS can be hard like this as well, especially as "solved" legacy issues still regularly crop up in tutorials and code-bases. Many times I remember helping newer folks with challenges they found online that seemed to them like they were testing hard computer science problems, but were more just trivia to navigate some bad design decisions of JS (eg gotcha problems on "this" / binding, IFFE, hoisting, async/promises/callbacks, to name a few)