Yeah. That's a good articulation of some of the problems but that's tough to learn them the hard way. I wrote a comment below talking a bit about how a lot of these problems start to go away with Exponent but I wanted to offer some thoughts if you or your teammates have embarked on the raw React Native route.
One thing I've learned from working with React Native is that you want to stay fairly up to date with the frequent releases. The Exponent team puts a lot of work into upgrading our own dependencies and maintaining the Exponent API that other developers depend on.
Authors of components and other npm packages will update their code to work with the latest version of React Native. It takes energy to stay up to date since you need to read the release notes and breaking changes and sometimes it's helpful to scan the commit history on the release branch. But this way you can use react-redux v4 and other actively developed dependencies.
On the other hand, though, sometimes component authors don't maintain their projects or support one platform but not the other. When dependencies fall out of date there isn't an easy answer. In the past I've fixed the issues myself and sent pull requests. Showing financial support is also another approach; my teammate Brent wrote a post about this: https://blog.getexponent.com/putting-your-money-where-your-p.... The maintenance of open-source libraries isn't unique to React Native but it's perhaps exacerbated by its cross-platform nature and frequent release cycle.
For the issue about CPU ABIs, I believe React Native supports armeabi-v7a and x86 but not arm64-v8a or x64. It would be great to have native arm64 support but so far no one has needed it enough to implement it instead of using ndk.abiFilters. For what it's worth, this works for Exponent and several other companies with apps that use React Native like Facebook.