Don’t go for the bare RN path. They themselves now promote the use of metaframeworks, eg Expo.

Always keep up with dependencies with expo doctor and renovatebot. The ecosystem is ever changing (a bit of pain to be honest) and investing 5% of your time bringing everything up-to-date is more worth it here than in web React. Particularly because the RN ecosystem, meta in particular, are allergic to SemVer.