I built a React library for making games with JSX components and hooks instead of imperative loops, curious what React devs think

Hi r/react,

This is not meant to be a promotional post, I am mainly looking for opinions from people who spend all day writing React about whether this API actually makes sense outside my own head.

The project is CarverJS. It is free, open source, and MIT licensed, so there is nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for to try it. The core idea is that a game scene is just a tree of components, and the actual behavior, movement, physics, audio, camera, comes from hooks you call inside your own components, similar to how you would build any other React app.

I went this route because most game engines that try to work with React just wrap an existing engine loosely, and you end up dropping back into an imperative escape hatch constantly. I wanted the escape hatch to not be needed for common things, at the cost of maybe making unusual things harder. I am honestly not sure that trade was worth it.

There is also a multiplayer package that runs peer to peer instead of needing a server, but I do not want to make this post about a feature list. What I actually want to know is whether describing a game as components and hooks feels natural to you as a React developer, or whether it feels forced, like I bent React into a shape it was not meant to hold.

If you have tried other React game libraries before and switched away from them, I would really like to know why, that is more useful to me than anything positive anyone could say about mine. Whatever the answer is, the project stays free and MIT licensed either way, I am not trying to upsell anyone into anything, I just want to know if the core idea holds up.