I think the part that is hard to grasp is that React essentially has it's own runtime tangled with JS. With the introduction of hooks, there are non JS things going on, which is why React relies on the quirk of having the same order and number of hooks in your component. It also has Suspense which allows you to exit from the render function and return to that spot, which is definitely not a feature of JS. So yea, it's weird. I think the interesting question is trying to figure out what this means for the next version of React. I would like to see if it takes a page or two out of Svelte's book.