The massive popularity of React Native on the iOS platform suggests there's more to the story. Discord, Slack, Spotify etc might also beg to differ; all electron apps, all the most dominant players in their respective markets. Consider all the massive gaming successes on the Unity platform?

The deference to native purity is an engineering conceit not something that users actually care about except in rare cases.

They are, not because "native" code is inherently buggier but because the amount of code that needs to be written is multiplied by every platform you have to support to replicate the same experience per platform; more code = more bugs, and you have to handle all the nasty edge cases that are specific to each platform: a major increase in bugs is assured.

> And we are talking about a billion dollar company.

The size of the company doesn't matter, it makes no sense to massively increase the cost, complexity and staff size needed to support an existing product that's already massively successful.

> Cross-platform toolkits introduce their own class of bugs, which might require patches upstream to resolve, or annoying local forks.

This is true of literally any external source code you import into your project. However, if you re-invent the wheel you have to pay to fix it rather than having it fixed upstream for free.