I believe in the end it all boils down to the fact that JavaScript is a language that wasn't made for the needs of modern day (web) applications, but since it is still a standard, we need to force it into a form where we can have best control over its shortcomings. That's why things like Typescript, Flow and React exist in the first place. I know this article is about mobile app development, but I think JavaScript would not have the sort of widespread use today if it wasn't for the fact that we use it for website scripting.

So I guess that developers familiarity with the language is what makes it so popular (as in often-used) and is also why we suddenly start using it for arbitrary scripting and mobile app development. The obligatory use of JavaScript in web development led to a whole range of developers growing accustomed to it and now, in spite of its limitations, trying to transfer their ideas to other fields of development.

React Native is just a neat way for JavaScript (React) developers to be able to script UIs for mobile OS's without changing their toolset. And I think for that it's perfectly fine. Obviously if you've never been big into JavaScript I can totally see how cannot make much sense of it all and yeah a lot of the things pointed out are perfectly legitimate. Yet I still think the question whether it makes the language unusable for one scenario or the other is very very opinionated.