I agree that upgrading versions in react native is not as simple as increment it a number in package.json.

My advice to you in your case would be find the versions that work and then stick to them.

Only update when needed and treat migrations seriously (in a separate branch, migrate, test everything and only merge once everything works perfectly).

That’s what we do and we did rollback several migrations because of various problems. But given our complex stack I think this is fair enough.