Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door, starting my irrigation and a whole lot more. Plus Tailscale of course. Kind of a crazy world that we live in now.

Yes, I remember React Native being quite painful before Expo!

Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.

Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.