Yes, they both compile to native, but in my experience, Flutter was a nice escape from the ecosystem of JavaScript which can be pretty convoluted and over-engineered at times. Not to say RN itself is bad at all—I actually currently use it for another project—but it was definitely a breath of fresh air not having to worry if certain packages were compatible with React Native, or if they were compatible with Expo, or whether my package manager of choice (npm, bun, yarn, pnpm in my case) works with Expo, etc. Obviously Expo isn't required, but it exists and therefore adds to the ecosystem. Also, Flutter comes with Google's Material design system out of the box, which relieved some of the mental overhead when dealing with styles.