That is React Native isn’t it? A lot of people end up making custom components (using pure JS), but it’s completely possible to wrap native components and use them. The downside is someone needs to make the native component wrapper as React Native doesn’t really provide much in terms of that out of the box besides maybe a button component.

Expo has a new system that’s in beta that should make doing this much, much simpler (check out expo-modules).

Well yeah - you'd need to write that native code wrapper, which kind of defeats some of the purpose of React Native (not having to write native code).

As a user, I suppose it is disappointing there aren't bindings for _everything_ offered on the native platforms. However, there are a ton of packages provided by the community, especially since the "slim core" initiative from Facebook is pretty much done. They removed almost everything not essential from the core or React Native to make it much more focused and I suppose easy to maintain.