4 years ago might as well be a lifetime in Cordova/PhoneGap land. Things have changed quite dramatically, even the web APIs available alone have evolved quite a bit. We launched ionic beginning of 2014 and it wouldn't have been possible before as the browser runtime just wasn't ready.
Also everyone had to build UI from scratch before Ionic and other frameworks, and that was just crazy.
I tried to get back into PhoneGap after a two year absence. This was after the PhoneGap/Cordova split and it seemed to me like the entire ecosystem was in smoldering ruins.
Figuring out if you need to use either the PhoneGap or the Cordova binaries, and then finding correct documentation for the respective forks, was in itself a big hassle. But no more than trying to get the toolchain up and running. Holy backflipping cow was that a nightmare. I have managed to repress the details but it was something with installing NPM and then typing in magic commands and hoping some byzantine series of effects would occur correctly, which they never did.
I somehow managed to hack and slash the platform into a working configuration, only to discover that performance (for games) was still far from adequate. I'm sure it has its (non-game) uses, but the developer experience was probably the worst I have ever experienced.
Also everyone had to build UI from scratch before Ionic and other frameworks, and that was just crazy.