Why do you feel React Native is a dead end? I've built apps of all sizes with it and had a good amount of success. I love Swift as a language, but building the same app across platforms (Android/iOS) always feels so wasteful.
React Native is a pain to work with when the scope of your app becomes any larger than an agency level project (e.g. an app for an event that's only going to be used one weekend).
Once you start getting into requirements for a prime time production app (setting up APM tool, setting up tracking, setting up Google Analytics, native specific features that don't have a React Native hook yet) React Native is an extra layer of abstraction that slows you down. The experienced native developers hate working with it because they'd rather just use the related native platform themselves, but at the same time for any slightly complicated app you still need their expertise. Also, out of the box animations in React Native is difficult to work with, especially with less experienced developers, so you end up having to do a variety of work arounds to get animations between screens to look nice which you'd get out of the box just using Kotlin/Swift.
In 2020 if I needed to make an app quickly, cheaply, that worked on both platforms, I'd make a great mobile website and wrap it in a native shell. Any screen that needed a little bit extra "magic" I would do 100% native code for both platforms. This also allows you to ship updates to screens as you go without a complicated "codepush" JavaScript setup, as it's just a webview on the other end.
I'm still maintaining the React Native search app now, it works fine, but if we need to create an iOS version of it I'd definitely pitch doing it in native code.
Compared to SwiftUI it was far easier and even faster. Granted, I’ve worked with React a lot. But it’s really quite nice, I’m impressed with the whole ecosystem and how it’s grown.
I'm just starting to work on apps and I feel the same moral imperative, but have no special love for Xcode &co.