I wonder why there's so much dread for Cordova. It's a framework you don't interact with often while using it, so I would assume devs would have neutral, unemotional stance towards it, but apparently not.
Because a lot of us web deva used it once for a contract before swearing it and all of mobile development off forever. I’m sure it’s come a long way since, but it was pretty brutal to understand and debug years ago.
Because you're actually interacting with two completely different stacks at least that have a pretty leaky abstraction. So you only get the painful parts of iOS development, certificates and build chains not the fun parts. Repeat that for Android. points double barreled shotgun at chin
As a native iOS dev I write my own wrappers for web applications, I think Cordova is too just too much hassle for what it really does and only limits my possibilities as a native developer hosting a web application.
Cordova is highly popular, and is used by web developers with limited native development background. Given that Cordova manages native projects, which is complicated and ever changing, it proves to be a complicated effort. Additionally, it has a large community of volunteers building plugins, but with inconsistent maintenance like any OSS volunteer effort.
You're starting to see the same thing with other cross platform tools like React Native with managing upgrades and out of date plugins that rely on now-deprecated APIs. It's a hard problem if you're not willing to go in and learn how to manage each platform. Cordova is a victim of its own success when it comes to these surveys.