Probably has changed since then, but I remember the RN docs telling me to use Expo. I was wondering the whole time, do people actually use Expo or no. And why is it uploading my code to some website? Soon I had a clear answer; I had to "eject" from Expo to do a prod build or just add any native components. Not a good first impression.

That said, RN was a win in the long run. It was a lot less baffling than the notorious Xcode/Swift/ObjC/UIKit ecosystem I'd used for years.