I've been at orgs that wrote 3x apps and at orgs that shipped via RN. RN was a significantly superior choice ime. While yes, it wasn't 100% write once, it was pretty good and also avoided some of the ugly single-platform-only bugs I experienced at choice one, eg in core data libs (subtly different validations on data), that made the write 3 apps strategy be more like 4x work.

As for the article, honesty probably would have just had the author write something like: "RN: an unfortunate but maybe your best choice in these circumstances" instead of pretending there's serious alternatives eg the Apache garbage dump.