“better developer” is a strong word and I can see why a lot of folks are ticked off. In terms of React development, you are correct. Abandoning classes for hooks makes the DX really great.

We recently started a very large project and decided to use a trimmed version of JavaScript. On-boarding junior devs to start contributing to the project took just 2 weeks. These folks were mostly from the jQuery camp. Mind you, we had the whole enchilada (CRA, TypeScript, React router, Redux, Styled components, Grommet, Express, Storybook, Jest, cypress etc.) I attribute this success to minimizing the usage of JavaScript, TypeScript and React features. Devs were able to easily learn and adapt progressively.

It was not just class features that we held back on. Several other “mainstream” javascript constructs were considered as code smells: (https://medium.com/@rajeshnaroth/javascript-keywords-we-can-do-without-in-a-modern-react-app-5671f1ad5ed1)