It's really disappointing to me to see Redux being the "defacto standard" for React applications. It's overly decoupled for simple applications, which makes it harder to reason about the application. It also doesn't help that the Redux codebase itself is hard to understand.

It is only a tool you should reach for after you find you need it. Too few developers approach software development with this level of pragmatism and instead we get "use X because it's being used". I guess you need to understand the tool to know when to use it - but that doesn't mean it should become the "defacto standard".

Ironically Redux is being coupled with React, which is a great library for structuring UI into components and resulting it simpler to understand code.