[Suggestion]: How to avoid null checks when initializing useRef later

Summary

The example is very bad.

Page

https://react.dev/reference/react/useRef#avoiding-recreating-the-ref-contents

Details

The solution how to avoid this pitfall doesn't seem very robust. If for any reason you wanted to instantiate to VideoPlayer but you want your ref to generally be of type VideoPlayer | null you will never be able to put a null in there.

A more robust way actually seems to leverage useState via:

const [playerRef] = useState(()=>({current:new VideoPlayer()}))

While investigating this issue i've concluded that people in general misunderstand what useRef is, going to the extremes of thinking it's "just for dom elements". playerRef in this snipper is exactly MutableRefObject<VideoPlayer> and this approach doesn't involve all kinds of acrobatics, like lying to a type checker, checks inside the render body etc.

Read the useRef documentation at the linked “avoiding recreating the ref contents” section and review the current example and its stated typing assumptions. Compare the proposed useState approach with the existing guidance, then update the example or explanation so the intended ref type, null behavior, and initialization trade-offs are clear.