I can see, if you were a billion dollar company, how you’d have an Android infra team to bridge those performance-intensive items, with the UI team doing all their work in RN.

So you can’t be a startup/small shop if you want to do this well.

I assume it's easier to find a handful of skilled Android developers rather than staffing an entire engineering org with them.

From my experience with RN, you do need to get into the native bits, but most of the development will be not native. So the number of skilled native device engineers required should be less.