"Avoiding recreating the ref contents" disallowed by compiler lint

[yepitschunked]

The ref docs have a section on avoiding recreating the ref contents by doing something like this: https://react.dev/reference/react/useRef#avoiding-recreating-the-ref-contents

function Video() {
  const playerRef = useRef(null);
  if (playerRef.current === null) {
    playerRef.current = new VideoPlayer();
  }

This fails the react compiler eslint check with Ref values (the current property) may not be accessed during render. (https://react.dev/reference/react/useRef). Is this intentional?

[mvitousek]

Sorry it took us so long to address this! The compiler previously wasn't able to support this pattern because it didn't recognize a distinction between safely avoiding recreating the ref contents and arbitrary, unsafe reading and writing of refs. We just landed facebook/react#31188, which should address this issue and allow this pattern to work without signaling an error or bailing out the compiler.