The idea is you shouldn't really need to. You have tools to memoize expensive operations in a React-friendly way, but even then you shouldn't really have to think about render cycles.
YMMV but I the only time I've ever had to really think about this stuff was when trying to frankenstein legacy jQuery code into a React app.
In my experience, it's pretty easy to hit performance bottlenecks in React, so I don't think it's that uncommon to have to dive deeper for any reasonably complex codebase. Also, you basically have to understand the React render cycle to effectively use `useEffect` for anything more complex than "do this thing on mount".
YMMV but I the only time I've ever had to really think about this stuff was when trying to frankenstein legacy jQuery code into a React app.