The debug AndroidManifest.xml was removed and android:usesCleartextTraffic="${usesCleartextTraffic}" now lives in the main manifest, but example/android/app/build.gradle doesn't define a manifestPlaceholders value for usesCleartextTraffic in defaultConfig or per build type. Manifest merger will fail at assembleDebug/assembleRelease. This isn't caught by CI because the Unit Tests workflow only runs Jest — should we add the placeholders per the RN 0.81 template?

buildTypes {
    debug { manifestPlaceholders = [usesCleartextTraffic: "true"]; ... }
    release { manifestPlaceholders = [usesCleartextTraffic: "false"]; ... }
}

Also worth adding an ./gradlew assembleDebug step (and xcodebuild for iOS) to CI so future RN bumps don't ship broken example builds.

The root package.json has no engines field at all. If 20 is now the floor, should we set it on the published package too, to prevent consumers using Node 18 and install this fine only to break at build time on tooling internals.