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:
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.
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
VideoPlayerbut you want your ref to generally be of typeVideoPlayer | nullyou will never be able to put a null in there.A more robust way actually seems to leverage
useStatevia:While investigating this issue i've concluded that people in general misunderstand what
useRefis, going to the extremes of thinking it's "just for dom elements".playerRefin this snipper is exactlyMutableRefObject<VideoPlayer>and this approach doesn't involve all kinds of acrobatics, like lying to a type checker, checks inside the render body etc.