The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)
A big fallacy that I always see - and that is implied by this post - is that the work ends after shipping, a.k.a. "build it and they will come". That doesn't happen any more. So after you "ship" it, you need to promote it, advertise it, create buzz around it and make people use it. 
And that is a totally different kind of beast than coding something.But on the flip side, if you develop a side project just for yourself, you most certainly learn something. Heck, the author explicitly mentioned learning React Native, which is absolutely great and definitely worth investing time into.Learning things is valuable in itself.