I would prefer imitated components any day compared to dealing with the actual SDK native components. Especially when there is "one code" that compiles into corresponding these components on different platforms. These things always change with each SDK version on each platform, and there needs to be a lot of messy hand-stitching in the library (React Native) to keep things working as expected.
Imitating native components is actually the only realistic approach. Those components are guaranteed to work on newer OS versions, they work on any platform and they give you easy access to the low level guts.
Imitating native components seems both incredibly wasteful and also very fragile considering Google has an attention span comparable to a puppy.