I love that you asked this question. As someone who has created a few react native applications in the past, non expo environments has felt as an afterthought. I hope the react native team will improve the documentation and encourage the native platform as well as the expo platform. Some of us don't want to be locked into yet another SaaS with questionable payment tiers - when building your own modules and publishing is:

- Easier in the long run

- You're able to ship a far more featureful application if you deal with media and/or VoIP

- Passing apples reviews seem to be faster if you ship the modules yourself in my experience