I tend to be sus of usePrevious. Not saying it doesn't have a place, but often times it's cleaner to just write the diffing code you want directly in the handler. For instance, say you have a text field, and if the value changes you want to autosave. I would just put that right in the onBlur - `if (e.currentTarget.value != text) { autosave(e.currentTarget.value) }`. If you want to debounce, I would debounce the method, not the value.

I tend to agree with your overall assessment - your React code is not doing well if you're encoding events into state. That's why I try to avoid it! But I may be oversimplifying.