I've used Expo going on 3 years now, their development team is incredible. There are very few reasons to use base react-native over Expo anymore; They make upgrades to new RN versions easier, can support any custom native libraries, have an awesome build service (EAS), support OTA updates, their docs are great... I could go on and on. If you're a RN dev and haven't tried out Expo in the past year I highly recommend giving it another go - its not the Expo you remember before their custom dev-client days.
Adding support for custom native code to Expo definitely has been a game-changer for developers. Glad it has been working well for you!
I'm glad to hear the tech and, more importantly, the community have improved.
By "layer", I mean custom controls and animation toolkits that get bundled in an Expo-enabled project. Those are in addition to the RN-provided ones. It all adds to complexity.
There are also no custom UI controls or animation libraries bundled with Expo. The Expo Go starter app includes a preset SDK, and when developers create a build for the app stores or a development build of their own app, only the libraries they use are included.
IMO it would be a meaningful improvement for the react-native package to provide the minimal runtime needed, namely JSI, Hermes, Turbo Modules, Yoga, Fabric, and perhaps a few primitive view components like View, ScrollView, and Text. The package provides more than a library needs. Animations and gestures today are better served in my experience by modules outside of the react-native package, like Reanimated and Gesture Handler that use truly native gestures. React Navigation uses the system navigator UI and Expo Router adds file-based routing and universal links. Expo Image adds support for modern image formats like AVIF and WebP and uses mature, performant image libraries like Glide and SDWebImage. So there is definitely still work to be done that can improve quality and reduce complexity in RN.