He has plenty of people in his network who are professional developers with SwiftUI experience. However, he was talking about his gut feel from a core system service having so many UI nits from Apple, likely associating that with issues he has heard of from developers who have tried to adopt SwiftUI in their existing and/or new projects.
So thats the basis of my opinion - a quote or two from those full-time developers would added greatly to the article, significantly more his personal reaction.
As a developer with some client-side experience, I'd say the nits speak far more to Apple's MacOS development process these days than to the quality of SwiftUI. A decision was made to add it to the 13 beta and commit to shipping it, rather than hold it back for macOS 14.
Calling John Gruber a "journalist" is reductive. He is the inventor of markdown and has a history as a software engineer himself. He is also one of the most notable people who tracks things that many would consider obscure like Apple UI frameworks.
>I don't understand your reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325511
The standard library and API surface of Swift has changed dramatically every release. They don't have a real problem to solve, and they know they have a guaranteed userbase of their language, so it's gotten progressively weirder and shittier over the years.
>I'm curious what makes something a 'standard UI' when doing native cross-platform development.
Not that curious, because it's pretty easy to look up what React Native offers: https://reactnative.dev/docs/components-and-apis. Things like text inputs, buttons but also bigger conceptual stuff like list views and app navigation: https://reactnative.dev/docs/navigation. Those UI elements render differently in different mobile operating systems and React Native handles both gracefully.