The important point to me is when you said something like "when I learned the hooks better". This is the issue, something that, at first impression, leads (even indirectly) you to develop spaghetti code has an inherent design flaw. Not a big one, but still. Mind that not everyone will attempt to learn it better (most people will not).

The amount of people who would compose spaghetti code with the older React class syntax would be, IMHO, way smaller (although this syntax was retired for good reasons too), so this tells me something is in need of improvement.

I think the React team has to rethink some namings, repurpose some recommendations and provide some redundant structures there to improve this awesome lib, that is quickly losing ground to Vue and Svelte.