I think almost always, if there was a choice between making thing easier for the developer and squeezing more performance with more difficult practices, majority chose better developer experience.
Especially as chips get faster, teams can afford opting towards a better developer experience to move faster and retain happier engineers. It isn't only developer experience, also developer velocity. That was the whole motivation behind React Native in the first place.
From my experience, any native developers that work with React Native have a mental toll from having to adapt to what seems like unnatural technologies from the native side. Add on top of that the terrible web ecosystem, terrible JS base library (and, perhaps, the language itself), the lack of IDE (not code editors), the debugging experience, the packager performance, and it's just not a good experience for people who have worked in better developer environments, such as Android Studio, Visual Studio and Xcode. The only people really happy, from my experience, are web developers who are already familiar with this technology and ecosystem.