I was not part of the initial analysis team so cannot really comment if objc was more suitable as it would require to look at objc at that time and do tests etc but I suspect we would have had a more smoother experience. Though the the code at the time was bad and indeed something needed to happen to ensure future scalability of the teams and product/code, but I think there were more sane paths we could have taken. It would have cost the company more time/money and at that time the company was battling Grab, GoJek, didi, Lyft etc so we did not have time to lose. Lots of factors to take in to consideration. No real easy answer

I havent dabbled in mobile developer platform tooling for the last few years now so I cannot comment on the iOS side, all i remember is that back then it was a shitshow :) Mobile is still playing catch up to how backend infra and tooling operates, I suspect its better but probably still got a long way to go.