Every React project hits the same fork around month two. Prop drilling gets old. Someone says "we need state management." The next two days are an opinion war. Redux because it's what we know. Zustand because someone read a blog post. Context because "isn't that built in?" The mistake isn't picking the wrong tool. It's not noticing that the three you're choosing between solve different problems. What each one actually is Quick mental models. Most of the confusion lives there. Context API is a transport mechanism, not a state library. It lets a value cross the tree without prop drilling. That's it. The "state" that lives in a context is whatever you put in a useState near the provider. When that value's identity changes, every consumer re-renders. No selector layer, no batching, no devtools. It's a wire, not a store. Redux is a single store with predictable, traceable updates. One reducer, one source of truth, every change goes through the same pipeline so you can replay it.…