[jameside]

Exponent mitigates a lot of the problems the OP described partly because it's a coherent, maintained platform that is one of our core competencies and partly because the design of Exponent guides you away from those issues. The Exponent team spends a lot of time working with React Native and several members including myself are also core contributors to React Native so we see many of these issues up close.

With Exponent you generally write your entire app in JavaScript. We've found that you can build quite a large set of comprehensive apps with pure JS and the APIs that Exponent provides (https://docs.getexponent.com/versions/latest/sdk/index.html). We believe that set of apps will quickly grow as Exponent's API grows. Exponent is open-source, though, so if you needed to you could fork it and write your own native code in which case you might need to think about CPU ABIs. But most people developing on Exponent don't need to think about native code or ABIs at all.

We also stay on top of React Native's changelog and make sure our APIs keep working when React Native changes. Some of your other third-party dependencies might fall out-of-date but the Exponent API stays current. Also with Exponent there aren't any Xcode or Android Studio workspaces to keep up-to-date.

Static type systems for JS like Flow are getting better over time and if enough people use it (or contribute type definitions to https://github.com/flowtype/flow-typed) more of these runtime errors will become compile-time ones. Parts of the JS ecosystem do move quickly, though, largely because of the proliferation of npm.