do people bother to gather the evidence though? like perhaps performance, number of bugs per coding day, quantity and quality of output etc.
At our workplace, it's clear that Cordova hybrid is worse than maintaining both iOS/Swift and Android/Kotlin, in terms of bugs, development time, hiring/retention cost, user experience. But we still do it.
Sometimes it's just that there's less unknowns involved. A bug in Cordova might take a week to fix. A bug in Android or iOS might take 1-2 days. Statistically it would be a no brainer. But bugs are dreadful things and there's the possibility that it could take much longer than usual or go unnoticed.
Agile points are an example of something quantified in a way that isn't meaningful, while performance timing on an algorithm can be meaningful. Many things in programming languages like a for loop vs. recursion cannot be quantified meaningfully.