yes, you are right, however, AFAIK you still need to be logged + have it linked to eas project (because it uses eas credentials) + this method is planned to be deprecated soon [?] (I'm 100% sure I read stuff like this when researching it like half a year ago, but cannot find it for the love-of-god atm :D, but I would like to be proved otherwise, because the build step is the only thing I disliked about expo long-term wise)

... now looking more into it, I probably mistook `npm run export` / `expo build` with `eas build --local`. Is this correct?

I think your commands are kind of muddled. By `npm run export`, I assume you are referring to `expo export`? That is responsible for bundling your app for OTA updates. `expo build` is the deprecated method for building your Expo app with the old ExpoKit native shell app. Only `eas build --local` is the actual command for locally building your app.

Perhaps the issue you're thinking about was what I linked to in my other comment?

By my own thinking, I believe it's quite unlikely that Expo will ever manage to actually totally remove support for local builds, even though they probably will never encourage it; as otherwise, its really quite impossible to debug native builds, and indeed local builds are Expo's recommendation for debugging such issues. With regular React Native native dependencies now possible in Expo, a dizzying new array of hard to diagnose bugs can now be triggered, and its unlikely Expo is ever going to go back on their support for arbitrary native dependencies.

Yeah, afaik, in the old template version `npm run export` activated the `expo export` and THAT got deprecated (recently), however at the time (about half a year ago) I thought that the `--local` flag was getting deprecated. Sorry, that was a huge misunderstanding on my end!