Doesn't React Native depend on this very heavily for iOS?
No there's not in fact it's actively frowned upon because if salaries are standardized no one will get to enjoy those huge faang pays. It'll be averages. That is not the capitalist way.
You're doing the work highly paid facebook and vercel employees are getting paid for.
The risk is that over time Cocoapods will no longer work to integrate dependencies with ways Xcode wants them to be.
Switching to SPM is a massive undertaking for a large project with many intertwined dependencies and configuration options. It's far less configurable than Cocoapods with basically no scripting options during install.
Their progress already is pretty decent!