So Yeah – I hate useEffect

Lit[0] is the underdog winner here. Like the OP, I much prefer functional style and Lit is the only class-based thing in my repos, but it is much easier to deal with the lifecycle than React effects and hooks.

Lit is nearly bare metal HTML (and has been proposed as a permanent addition to standard HTML). It also doesn't need JSX because you just write regular HTML in tagged template literals.

Nearly all the "new, improved" reactive frameworks I see that are "better than React" are just trying to reinvent Lit.

[0] https://lit.dev