In fairness Qt also gets this right: It renders every pixel and it has a fast rendering architecture. Having used Qt, flutter is very attractive to me for the case where you have to work with a team. It can be hard to get together enough people nowadays who will want to work with even a little C++. The Qt libraries make it very easy IMO (most stuff is ref counted) but not everyone is going to buy that.
Qt is one of those things that I've heard of before, but did not know was still used for mobile development today.
The monthly commercial license fee is a bit of a downer though. I feel that a lot of software development agencies (my workplace included) are just not gonna bother with it and just use something free instead.
I agree about the C++ point with you. I have to confess I'm also one of those people who generally want to do things on a higher level. Would definitely give Qt a try if it was free for commercial purposes though.
The free license for Qt is the LGPL, which, although more restrictive than a fully permissive license like BSD or MIT, is still suitable for many commercial applications. (You can't ship proprietary modifications to Qt, but you can ship a proprietary app that includes Qt as a dependency. Your app can use a modified version of Qt if you open source your modifications.)
It's native in the sense that it doesn't bundle an entire Chrome browser runtime with it. But it does not interact with native APIs; it re-implements the native platform's look and feel.
You're applying the word "native" to the wrong thing.
"Native" in the context of GUI frameworks doesn't have to do with code being interpreted vs compiled. It means the framework creates UI using the toolkit that ships with the OS you're targeting. It means Cocoa on MacOS and UWP or WPF or WinForms on Windows.
It means when you scroll past the end of the text in a textbox you get a bouncy effect on macOS just like every other Mac application, because it's ultimately calling the same function that every other Mac application calls.
If someone made a JavaScript library that wrapped Cocoa and UWP, it would be called a "native" toolkit, because it wraps the controls that are shipped with each OS. That's why React Native is called what it is - it's actually creating dialogs and views on iOS with the same functions you would call if you were doing it in Swift.
