I'm guessing the only difference is that useEffect will guarantee that it will always run after the render, it also makes sure that every other component that needs to re-render will finish rendering before running the effect.

Though I can't really think of a good use case for this.

For this exact case you're right because undefined is passed as the dependencies of useEffect.

This means useEffect runs on every render and thus the event handlers will unnecessarily get detached and reattached on each render.

function listener() {
  console.log('click');
}

function Example() {
  const [count, setCount] = window.React.useState(0);

  window.React.useEffect(() => {

    console.log(`adding listener ${count}`);
    window.addEventListener("click", listener);

    return () => {
      console.log(`removing listener ${count}`);
      window.removeEventListener("click", listener);
    };
  }); // <-- because we're not passing anything here, we have an effect on each render
  
  window.React.useEffect(() => {
    setTimeout(() => {
      setCount(count + 1);
    }, 1000)
  });
  
  return count;
}

window.ReactDOM.render(window.React.createElement(Example), document.getElementById('root'))

<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react@16/umd/react.development.js"></script>
<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@16/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script>
<div id="root"></div>

But if you explicitly declare no dependencies by passing in an empty array [], useEffect will only run once, thus making this pattern perfectly legitimate for event handler attachment.

function listener() {
  console.log('click');
}

function Example() {
  const [count, setCount] = window.React.useState(0);

  window.React.useEffect(() => {

    console.log(`adding listener ${count}`);
    window.addEventListener("click", listener);

    return () => {
      console.log(`removing listener ${count}`);
      window.removeEventListener("click", listener);
    };
  }, []); // <-- we can control for this effect to run only once during the lifetime of this component
  
  window.React.useEffect(() => {
    setTimeout(() => {
      setCount(count + 1);
    }, 1000)
  });
  
  return count;
}

window.ReactDOM.render(window.React.createElement(Example), document.getElementById('root'))

<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react@16/umd/react.development.js"></script>
<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@16/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script>
<div id="root"></div>

It's not quite the same.

• Giving it an empty array acts like componentDidMount as in, it only runs once.

• Giving it no second argument acts as both componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate, as in it runs first on mount and then on every re-render.

• Giving it an array as second argument with any value inside, eg , [variable1] will only execute the code inside your useEffect hook ONCE on mount, as well as whenever that particular variable (variable1) changes.

You can read more about the second argument as well as more on how hooks actually work on the official docs at https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-effect.html