You're not missing anything. Redux solved a real problem in 2015 when React was younger. But unless you're managing genuinely complex, interconnected state with time-travel debugging needs, it's overhead. In my experience, most teams reach for it out of cargo cult—they saw it in a tutorial or their last company used it. TanStack Query + useState is usually the right call. The boilerplate-to-value ratio on Redux for basic CRUD apps is just bad. That said, I've seen one legit use case: when you need normalized state across deeply nested components and prop drilling gets painful. But that's increasingly rare with composition patterns.