> Ironically the reality here is backwards:

Maybe you quoted the wrong the thing? but there's no irony here, and it's definitely not backwards in reality: Apple and Google have both severely limited what PWAs can do such that they are vastly inferior to native apps. It would very difficult to argue otherwise.

> There's a big difference between running some native code and spinning up an entire JS virtual machine and worker environment to (effectively) modify some JSON

Presumably React Native apps do something to that extent? Or, if they don't, whatever optimization they use could certainly be applied "under-the-hood" to PWAs.