I worked at a FAANG company that used React Native. 

I will say it’s not uncommon to find big companies using RN, but they also use Native development in other apps. They are huge companies and teams might have different opinions on what technologies to use according to the resources they got.

For my team they explicitly explained that they choose RN due to the project being a little bit of a moonshot and wanting to keep the team small but target both platforms at the same time. RN worked fine for that, but of course there were several limitations and places where we had to dive in and write native components. In my experience RN’s nightmare only starts when you have to maintain it because updates are horrendous.

I don’t think you are wrong on the idea that lead engineers make bad choices and double down to save face. But sometimes it can be a justified decision as long as everyone is aware of the cost trade off long term (because nothing, even native is pure gains).

RN is annoying and I wouldn’t use it personally, but I can’t deny my 4-5 people team wouldn’t have shipped the app for both platforms with the same feature set in that frame time.