I'm writing mobile apps using angular / Cordova and ionic. When they are running on a device I can't tell the difference between a native app and a JS Cordova one.
I think JS is the future of mobile apps.
Sure, what kind of app are you writing ? games ? a video player ? a messaging app like Telegram ? a background activity on Android ? of course if it's a basic CRUD app, you're not going to notice the difference. try to make a 2D or 3D game with Cordova and see how it runs. The question you should ask yourself is, do you need a webpage in a native-shell at first place when you could just develop a website.
We did not have chump change for developers either - I've numerous contributions to Angular and Ionic, and one of my former co-workers when I was there is now on the Angular team.
React Native is a superior abstraction, since it allows you to hook directly into native components very easily (try writing custom Cordova plugins), and keeps high level logic in JS.