A Higher Order Component (HOC) in React primarily serves the purpose of reusing component logic. It allows you to abstract common functionality and share it among multiple components, enhancing code reusability. HOCs are not primarily used for styling, managing state, or organizing Redux store actions, although they can be part of a larger solution.

The useEffect hook in React is used for executing side effects in functional components. Side effects include tasks like data fetching, DOM manipulation, and subscriptions. useEffect allows you to perform these tasks after rendering and to handle cleanup when the component unmounts, ensuring that side effects do not disrupt the component's behavior.

When you want to defer the loading of a component until it's needed, you can use React's Lazy feature. The Lazy function allows you to load components asynchronously, improving the initial loading time of your application. The other options are not specific to deferring component loading in React.

In a React application implementing Web Workers, the SplitChunksPlugin might be beneficial for better code splitting. This plugin can help optimize your application's bundle splitting, ensuring that Web Worker scripts are separated from your main application bundle, resulting in improved performance and load times. The other options are commonly used plugins but are not specifically focused on optimizing code splitting for Web Workers.

If an error is thrown inside an event handler, it will be caught by error boundaries in React. Error boundaries apply to errors thrown in the component tree beneath them, including those that occur during event handling. This ensures that errors in event handlers can be gracefully handled, preventing the entire application from crashing.

CSS Modules is a styling approach in React that ensures there's no collision between CSS class names. Each CSS Module scope is local to the component, preventing unintended style clashes. This is especially useful in large projects with multiple developers. Inline Styles, styled-components, and Material-UI use different styling strategies that don't inherently prevent class name collisions.

Immutable state handling in React leads to more predictable application behavior. When state is immutable, it becomes easier to reason about how changes to state affect the application's behavior, reducing the risk of unexpected side effects and making the codebase more maintainable.

The Render Props pattern differs from Higher Order Components in that it passes a function as a prop to a component, allowing the component's consumer to render content using that function. In contrast, Higher Order Components are a design pattern that involves wrapping a component to enhance its functionality. Render Props is typically used with functional components, while Higher Order Components can be used with both functional and class-based components.

To ensure smooth user interactions during image manipulation in a React application, it's most effective to use a non-blocking, asynchronous image processing library. This approach allows image processing to occur in the background without blocking the main thread, resulting in a responsive user experience. Increasing image quality, adding distractions, or limiting functionality do not directly address the performance issue and may not lead to smooth interactions.

React Developer Tools is the tool commonly used to profile and inspect the performance of a React application. It's a browser extension that provides a set of features for debugging React components, inspecting the component hierarchy, monitoring props and state, and more. While other tools like Redux DevTools and ESLint are valuable for different aspects of development, they are not primarily used for profiling and inspecting React application performance.