You seem to imply 4 projects is 4x the time. In my experience I spent more than 2x the time just getting a Cordova project up an running compared to just building the whole dam thing from scratch on iOS. Why? Cordova kept changing all the time. Documentation sucked. It was buggy. The tools were substandard and it had inconsistent behavior across platforms. Terrible experience. I have colleagues who had the same terrible experience but they still cling to the idea that it will somehow work out in the end. The idea of one code to rule all the platforms is just too enticing.

I don't doubt that some people will be more effective at using Cordova. The problem is people treat this decision as if it is independent of the people who will build the solution. Somebody with years of training doing JavaScript and practically no experience with writing native code will likely be much faster with Cordova. That is why these projects exist in the first place. There are so many JavaScript developers out there. For them even a crappy setup like Cordova will still be faster than native development.

But in reverse if you actually got good experience with native platforms and know the tools, Cordova is not going to deliver. You wont have access to the kind of debugging tools, editors, type checking, GUI builders, documentation etc you get on a native platform, which makes a native developer work efficiently.