At rosaly.com we've built our "app" with something similar

we didn't go the PWA way (because of app store), but something quite similar to the article

1. we have a symfony website with simple web pages but with a "app look" (yes no react , no api, like it's the 2000s all over again)

2. we have a think react native wrapper (at first 17 lines, no it's 90s as we support push notification, hardware back button etc.) that embed a react-native webview

so we have nearly no javascript, just modern css and we pay really attention to performance and it's a dream

1. no javascript removes a lot of hassle

2. no api removes a lot of hassle too

3. html+css and we support all platforms, so a good design and backend engineers is all you need

we're live for a year, have raised money and have customers. We've been through several store update (to keep react native up to date and put some changelog).

I call it "retrogressive-app"