Comment by calvin_c

Exactly. It’s an abstraction, you will always be a few libraries and components away from implementing what you actually want, but that’s a lot to build on just to use a system provided tool. For instance, I’m working on upgrading my company’s app to use iOS 11’s new password auto fill APIs. All it needs is for you to set the UITextField’s contentType properly to one of a dozen enumerated values, in this case Username and Password. React Native doesn’t expose that propertie on the TextField component however, so I have to either build my own extension on top of the TextField component or form the React Native project and submit a PR to get this feature working, a feature that’s explicitly supposed to be painless to implement. There are so many cases like this around React Native, the community mindset is usually just to find another dependency to integrate.