Yes, it is quite saddening. iOS used to be the platform that destroyed Android in user experience in no small part due to its “bare metal” programming model. I still remember how laughably slow and laggy my friends’ Android devices were, with their top of the line Snapdragon whatever uber CPU, compared to my meager iPhone 4. If I wanted a device with 100ms input latency, passing all of my gestures through countless layers of indirections and declarative tree-diffing nonsense, I may as well use an Android that doesn’t require me to shell out $150 annually to install my own software…
Objective-C is an awful mess but at least the toolchain is able to natively mix Objective-C, C and C++ code without much effort.
And the low-level parts of iOS are still using C API.
Google tried the same thing at first, Java was the only supported API for many years, they reluctantly added the NDK for "special uses".