I like the fact that you said "2 decades back" and then in the same breath you said "classes had provided a standardized way to do stuff in React land." Did you know that classes weren't the original way to do things in React land because JavaScript didn't have them? You'd use React's own version using React.createClass instead. For the longest time there were people against the introduction of classes in JavaScript because it obscured JavaScript's prototypal inheritance nature and they stuck to React.createClass and lamented that "class Foo extends React.Component" was too much divergence from React.createClass and made things inconsistent.