Second, side effects are just about in every React component where you use a hook.
Third, (hypothesis) `useEffect` is probably a misnomer that stick there because it would be a breaking change to rename it to something more proper.
Words and bickering aside, you can write great applications with React, that's fact. It is also a fact that a lot of folks are using it wrong, which shows either a problem with React learnability itself, or with its documentation, or well, with the programmers themselves.