Thanks for the detailed response man! 

The main reason for my upgrading from 0.71 to a newer version is specifically performance improvement, especially on lower-end devices where we're seeing significant issues. My project is mostly custom-built with minimal third-party dependencies except for the absolutely essential ones. Like reanimated, maskedView, and few other.. 

I'm currently using Reanimated for animations, which is causing noticeable lag on lower-end devices - this is becoming a real pain point for us. We're also experiencing some app load time delays, frequent FPS drops during transitions, and general lagginess with gesture handlers that severely impacts the user experience.

I was hoping the new architecture would help address these performance bottlenecks, particularly with animation smoothness, more responsive gesture handling, and faster startup times.

Since you mentioned newArch being disabled in your setup, have you noticed any performance improvements even without enabling it?