When a developer suggests spending "hours of research" on a problem is enough to make them abandon a potential technology, I don't often think the problem lies with the technology.

For what it's worth my team uses React Native and we've faced the same problems; we solved it by making sure every project has one dev capable of doing the lower level native work. That still means the rest of the team can be web developers, who are much easier to hire because more people know that stack. That alone makes RN a good bet despite its quirks.