As a Java, Kotlin & Rust programmer, React Native does not appeal to me either.
The main appeal seems to be that web devs can continue to use js for most of their work, it does not really appeal to a mobile dev..
Web developers should remain on the web, or put enough time to learn new technologies. For a good developer, moving to another language and framework is not really that difficult. Just means to a goal. If, however, the mere thought of learning Swift or Java scares the living hell out of a "developer", then that "developer" is better left outside of my ecosystem as a mobile apps user.
From what I gather this is more often a business decision than an individual developer's decision.
When a product needs to go mobile for the first time on two platforms you have to make a business decision:
1) You can grow the team to tackle both platforms in parallel.
2) You can have the team do it one platform at a time.
3) You can have the team do it one time.
Every option has big trade offs in either cost, time or user experience. There's somewhat of a gradient there as well in terms of code reuse giving the options avaiable right now.
React Native sits somewhere between 2 and 3.
It's really a matter of context for the business. How much time you have? Resources? What does your target user expect?
For a lot of B2B companies, there's just not enough value added to choose between 1 and 2 since you either take more cost or more time to market and your user just needs the feature not the best possible experience.
For a lot of B2C, your product may already be born mobile and you need the best possible experience to compete.
The thing about React Native vs other frameworks is that it is cross platform. There aren't many proper cross platform frameworks which allow for 1 app, to be web-based and have native siblings in 1 codebase.
I'm not scared of Swift or Java, But I am frigthened of their ux. Even big apps like eclipse put me off, due to their bloat.
Also frameworks like QT don't offer the same ease of development.
Remember React-Native is currently on version 0.22, and over a year old. IMO it currently offers much better ux than TK/Swing/Qt/...
