As someone who’s worked with react for years, I’m convinced that react itself is the problem and there’s no way to educate new people on the proper way to use it without essentially teaching them everything the abstraction is intended to do for them. Why should newbs have to care about mutations and state dependencies when the api is apparently designed to help them forget about those things?

Idk, I don’t see a problem with saying a new language is unintuitive. For example, in js I still consider the horrible type coercion and the “fix” with the triple-equals very unintuitive indeed. On the flip side, when learning C# I found the multiple ways of making comparisons to be pretty intuitive, and not footguns.