The hooks API literally "hooks" into React's lifecycle, by allowing the ability to save state and force re-renders as needed. In addition, React-Table explicitly implements support for doing rendering of whatever React "cell" components you have supplied as part of the column definition.

Yes, a lot of the logic probably could be extracted as a pure vanilla JS lib, but there'd also be a lot of work that would have to be done to then integrate it into React.

Also, the creator is a fairly prolific author of React-based libraries, and that was his focus when he wrote React-Table. If someone else wants to try to create a vanilla JS version, you're free to do so.

This is specifically designed for React and uses the native APIs for best performance and usability. Being framework-agnostic isn't a goal and there are other components like AG-Grid you can look at if you need that.

Hooks is basically a declarative way to keep things in sync instead of writing a bunch of imperative code yourself. You describe the functionality that should run when some data changes (or all the time) and React handles the rest. The code inside hooks is just javascript, and by being functions it's much simpler than class-based structures. Vue is also working on a similar composition API.

This is a good walkthrough that explains hooks: https://wattenberger.com/blog/react-hooks