Here's hoping it hasn't been too many times... Is is intended/ok to have

State

in ViewModels?

Yes*

State<T>

is intended to be consumed by compose. If your ViewModel is holding UI state for compose-only code, then it works great as a UI-state holder similar to LiveData and is often more concise than alternatives. The idiomatic form of state in a ViewModel looks like this:

class MyViewModel: ViewModel() {
    // define a state object & limit writes to only inside this ViewModel
    var clicks by mutableStateOf(0)
        private set

    fun increment() { clicks++ }
}