When you mention that you had to often walk into like a scuba shop to try to get a sign on, were people more receptive if you 'had an app for that' already?
I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible at the lowest cost.
Personally though, I've found the DX of Flutter far above RN. I always had random packages break on RN that I had to fix every time, while with Flutter most of what you need is already included in the framework, including a component UI library for Android and iOS.
With Flutter everything just works. I love Dart and the Dart analyser. The documentation is phenomenal and the speed at which I can pump out an app is crazy compared to other solutions.
Don't get me wrong, Flutter has an abundance of its own issues (iOS jank, Flutter web, too many state management solutions) but it still at the end of the day it does the best possible job.
If I have a random app idea which needs to be tested and deployed quickly, I am using Flutter 10 times out of 10.