It’s more web than RN and depending on what you’re doing might not feel as native, but it’s pretty easy to make a solid app with it.
I find most people making this argument haven't worked full time with one or the other.
If you're a larger company who can afford two teams/groups, or if you are working on something lower level like OpenGL or ML, it makes sense.
Having done both for multiple years, I can't understand when people think it would be faster to build separate apps. It's not even remotely close. You're swapping out doing bug fixes, platform specifics like push notifications, the occasional separate UI implementation, and distribution twice with doing _everything_ twice.
There’s definitely a huge learning curve and some rough edges, but the speed with which I can write a polished UI in it is staggering.
The problem isn’t that middlewares are bad. They are great: Unity and Unreal, your browser, Java…
The problem is mobile apps don’t make money. Games and web services do. The OP is talking about low quality users. They’re broke! They’re not incentivized to fix their own problems either! It’s all just a blub for them. So middlewares improve for the audiences where they’re at least viable, and stagnate when they support something that no one should be bothering to do in the first place.
Previously, much of my draw to things like Expo has been the reduction in mental load for handling multiple different platforms. In theory, they're built by people who know the different "gotchas" and can help me avoid them.
In practice, something always requires you to dive into the underlying layers. At which point, you're just fighting with bug-filled abstractions.
If you have react experience I really suggest giving modern RN & expo a try.
Tried at the time Xamarin and PhoneGap, and bit later RN, each one has his quirks and things that works in one platform but not in other so in the end you end up building one app for each platform more or less, but with more bugs than the official ones.