I spent some time investigating why this was removed. (In the future, it would be helpful if you explain your reasoning around changes like this.)

From reading the code, it looks like the purpose was to handle a scenario where the user goes from not being voiced to being voiced. It looks like the send button is only rendered when the user is voiced, so I guess the idea is that we want to "reset" the send button animation state before we start rendering it.

I analyzed whether this reset is really necessary:

• From reading setUpSendIconAnimations, it seems like the only thing that could have changed is this.props.draft
• We can imagine a scenario where it matters:
  • shouldShowTextInput starts out as false
  • draft had just changed, and "starts" an invisible animation
  • shouldShowTextInput turns to true
• In this case we would want to show the send button in its eventual state rather than in-between animation state
• But I'm not sure such a scenario is possible for two reasons:
  • draft shouldn't really change for a thread if !shouldShowTextInput. It is client-local state, and as far as I know it is only set by ChatInputBar itself
  • If this.sendButtonContainerStyle is not rendered, then Reanimated should not run any animation

With all that said, I think the most "correct" thing to do here if we wanted to be safe would be:

updateSendButton(currentText: string) {
  const targetValue = currentText === '' ? 0 : 1;
  this.props.targetSendButtonContainerOpen.setValue(targetValue);
  if (!this.shouldShowTextInput) {
    this.props.sendButtonContainerOpen.setValue(targetValue);
  }
}

This feels more "correct" to me... basically what we're saying is that we don't want an animation to run when the send button is not being shown, we just want to immediately update its position to where it should be, so it's in the right place if it starts being rendered.

What do you think of this shorthand?

I don't think this should be in the dep list. Doesn't it result in everything being reset whenever initialSendButtonContainerOpen changes?

You can use eslint-disable like so to disable the ESLint rule:

// eslint-disable-next-line react-hooks/exhaustive-deps