I’ve dabbled with iOS development and Xcode doesn’t seem that braggable as a tool.
Of course the modern Javascript web stack isn’t pretty either, so I guess what I’m saying is everything sucks a bit.
I’ve seen nice results and crappy results regardless of what particular stack it’s made in. IMO the biggest difference shows up in integration with the rest of the system. If you want to hook into the Files app or Siri Shortcuts, native apps certainly have a leg up.
That depends. I agree that the tooling around hybrid apps is pretty bad (debugging React Native layout issues is painful), but the tooling around web apps is really good these days, and that carries over to PWAs (and Electron, Ionic, etc) to a large extent. Chrome's perf flame chart is ace, and if you use VS Code you can get decent IDE debugging going. It's fragile and it takes effort to start but it's waaaay better than it was 5 years ago.
CSS (or Yoga) is proper layout if you know how to use it. Most native APIs are available to JS even on iOS. Most animation is rendered on the GPU in web tech unless you're doing things very wrong. We even have things like Lottie, AirBNB's SVG-based After Effects animation tool.
All this stuff is just done now regardless of what tech you choose. The arguments against web tech are old. The platform has caught up.
It has not. There are no tools for the web approaching even a Delphi RAD or a Qt Creator ca 2001.
CSS layouts are a joke, and trying to create anything as complex as a modern app with CSS is a road of blood and tears (go ahead and use CSS to implement something like Sencha. Hell, start with any constrained layout available for most native frameworks and toolsets out of the box).
By "most native APIs" you mean a very small subset deemed more-or-less safe to execute in the browser (you won't ever have full access to, let's say, UIKit, or AVFoundation).
And even if animation is rendered on GPU, 1) if you have a lot of them, the browser will struggle, and 2) web animations are extremely limited, primitive, and extremely constrained by layout. Good luck not running into reflow issues for animations which are a breeze on the native platforms. And good luck working around these issues using only animations which won't trigger them.
> All this stuff is just done now regardless of what tech you choose.
There are people who build OSes using only assembly. It doesn't mean that tools or capabilities of assembly are anywhere near available for other tech.
Sure, you can get to the same result eventually. But the tools to do so are better and more intuitive for making Android or iOS apps.