That's a fair point about the opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle but I imagine to do that would require solid knowledge of both React and Android. Where do I start? I am more inclined to go towards the native Android side first.

Aa a follow up, I just did a test with a native Android app doing the same thing: getting an image through an Intent. With the native Android app, the same image that was crashing the React Native app doesn't cause any problems.