Things I Stopped Writing in React (And What Replaced Them)

Over the past year, I noticed I was deleting more code than I was writing. Not because I was cleaning up old mistakes, but because React had quietly started doing things I used to do myself. At first, I thought it was just me getting more comfortable with the codebase, but then I realized React itself had changed, and a lot of what I was writing by hand had a simpler, built-in way of doing it now. These are five of those patterns, which I was writing before, and what replaced them after React 19. 1. Stopped Writing useMemo and useCallback For a long time, these two were almost a reflex. Open a component, see a function being passed as a prop, wrap it in useCallback . See a filtered list being computed, wrap it in useMemo . It was just what you did. Not always because you had profiled something and found a problem, but because it felt responsible. The React Compiler changed that. It runs at build time, reads your component, and handles the memoization automatically. You write the compon