I actually remember Delphi and C++ Builder (though I spent most of my time in Visual C++), and React Native certainly wasn't my first exposure to hot reloading, but if your only exposure to iOS programming was via XCode, having hot reloading (whether that's React Native or Flutter or Xamarin) can seem like a revelation in how much more productive you can be, when you're not waiting for your app to rebuild and install. So from that perspective, it is kind of like rediscovering the old. (And I didn't mention it, but React Native can reload while preserving state, it's just not the default).

Flutter looks very promising btw, I probably can't use it yet though for the same reasons as Matcha, which is my current project depends on too many external libraries (for which React Native and the larger JavaScript community has been great).