At my company we have been using react-native for years without Expo, and aside from some performance issues here or there it has mostly been great (we also use Android auto so that's my reference to "native-ish mobile").
Recently we've been trialling Expo again, and I think it has much approved from where it was a few years ago (when we went in the opposite direction). It mostly saves you time on the build side and gives you some known to work 'good' libraries to depend on, and if you want it, a file based router (we just kept using react-navigation directly, on which the router is built).
The biggest pain in react-native are the major version updates which are regularly breaking (and the lack of css grid , you'll have to make do with flex)
With Expo, that's not necessarily gone, but the updates are usually smaller compared to respective Android updates (but you still need to comply with new rules for app stores), and usually less painful because with Expo (unlike react-native directly) there's less to manually update within the platform native files which is error prone, even when you use Microsoft's upgrade tool. When you are some versions behind it was sometimes easier to bootstrap from scratch and copy over your own code.
One thing to say about Expo is that, here too, it's easier to start with a newly created app than to add expo later on, partly because Expo's docs assumed you did that.
Recently we've been trialling Expo again, and I think it has much approved from where it was a few years ago (when we went in the opposite direction). It mostly saves you time on the build side and gives you some known to work 'good' libraries to depend on, and if you want it, a file based router (we just kept using react-navigation directly, on which the router is built).
The biggest pain in react-native are the major version updates which are regularly breaking (and the lack of css grid , you'll have to make do with flex)
With Expo, that's not necessarily gone, but the updates are usually smaller compared to respective Android updates (but you still need to comply with new rules for app stores), and usually less painful because with Expo (unlike react-native directly) there's less to manually update within the platform native files which is error prone, even when you use Microsoft's upgrade tool. When you are some versions behind it was sometimes easier to bootstrap from scratch and copy over your own code.
One thing to say about Expo is that, here too, it's easier to start with a newly created app than to add expo later on, partly because Expo's docs assumed you did that.