I have found a way around all this, which nevertheless requires a thin layer of interaction with the walled garden, and this to put everything in a VM, expose only the things that need to be exposed from the host OS, and run a common framework across all possible platforms.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of these kinds of projects out there, mostly obscure, probably by necessity because in fact it is a lot of work to maintain such a system. But, due to the abhorrent nature of the OS vendors, sleeping at the wheel, there is no choice other than to build another, OS-like, system on top.

And where that is always happening, and still will for quite a while I hope, is in the games engine department. Sooner or later, games engines become operating systems, become hosts for spreadsheets and collaboration and other such nonsense...

All this is to say, I have my xcode builds running in a VMWare container, they're safely backed up and replaceable, etc., and all they do anyway is build the target hosts: android, ios, linux, windows, macos, etc. for the .. separated through an abstraction layer .. application.

The use of Lua, I think, is a good example. Lua on all the mobile platforms, would deflate the whole thing...