I've recently been debugging some old React code developed by my colleagues and noticed that they would declare some useRef's inside their functional components like this:

const refName = useRef(...).current;

This isn't the first time I've seen ref's declared like this in the React community, but it seems to be rare.

I can only assume that they've done this so that they only have to reference it by the variable name further down the line - as opposed to variableName.current.

So, this got me wondering: other than making the code a little bit cleaner, are there any clear downsides or benefits to declaring references this way?