Streaming stateful processing in Apache Spark evolved a lot from the first versions of the framework. At the beginning was updateStateByKey but some time after, judged inefficient, it was replaced by mapWithState. With the arrival of Structured Streaming the last method was replaced in its turn by mapGroupsWithState.
updateStateByKey function, explained in the post about Stateful transformations in Spark Streaming, is not the single solution provided by Spark Streaming to deal with state. Another one, much more optimized, is mapWithState.
Spark Streaming is able to handle state-based operations, ie. operations containing a state susceptible to be modified in subsequent batches of data.
