NativeScript was born after forking Appcelerator Titanium’s Hyperloop project, which was meant to create direct bridge between native APIs and the JavaScript runtime.
At the time the fork happened just when Appcelerator made Hyperloop development private since it was facing more or less the same anger from the community that we see in this article and could not keep the promises that hyperloop was meant to fulfull. (This reminds me a lot the current situation with React Suspense)
The idea in the community was more or less “those bullies from telerik think they can fork it and finish it before us, they will never complete it” and indeed they faced a lot of the problems that was delaying the release of hyperloop itself.
At the end of the day the embraced Angular as a React Native killer (React Native more or less killed the competition for bridged native app frameworks IMHO) but never reached the quality required… wait for it… for a commoditizied framework. That’s the problem: no one will ever pay for a framework which competes with free (if proprietary and not compatible) native frameworks.
(Fun enough, Titanium SDK is actually incredibly solid right now, still following every native SDK release with only some weeks of delay)