I had similar issues taking over a project using an older version of React Native. Upgrading is incredibly painful since there's no stable version and libraries don't always update to match. The current release of React Native uses a release candidate version of React, which many of our dependencies haven't yet updated to match, so we're either stuck with an old version with poor compatibility or have to fix dozens of third-party libraries to try to catch up - both are not ideal, and both are caused by constant breaking change releases.