In iOS 2 UIKit was far more 'mature' of a framework than SwiftUI was, and it wasn't full of missing stair steps like basic navigation pushes working without it being a whole irritating song and dance, lazy loading table cells & navigation views, being able to hide the tab bar when you push a screen on one tab with things like "hidesBottomBarWhenPushed", etc.
Overall I think SwiftUI when released, and even today in some corners, is a general overall theme of incompleteness with features available in iOS 2's UIKit.
Did early iOS have it's irritating parts? For sure, but they were there for performance reasons mostly and it wasn't an 'incomplete' framework like SwiftUI is.
Overall I really like SwiftUI. As a total iOS newbie when it was new, I don’t think I would have bothered if the only option was to slog through UIKit.
But all the complaints about its incompleteness are spot-on. How did they think it was ok to launch without basic stuff like NavigationStack? Standard Apple “piss on my head and tell me it’s raining”.
Overall I think SwiftUI when released, and even today in some corners, is a general overall theme of incompleteness with features available in iOS 2's UIKit.
Did early iOS have it's irritating parts? For sure, but they were there for performance reasons mostly and it wasn't an 'incomplete' framework like SwiftUI is.