From useEffect to TanStack Query: What Changed My Perspective

When I first started learning data fetching in React, the dependency array in useEffect confused me more than the fetch request itself. But after building a Meme Generator, it finally started making sense. A few weeks later, I built another project using TanStack Query because I wanted to see how a different approach to server state felt in practice. I wasn't trying to prove that one approach was better than the other. I simply wanted to compare what it actually felt like to build with both. Wha