Hey Brad, definitely take a look at Capacitor. We built it explicitly to solve those issues in Cordova. Also keep in mind Flutter also has to deal with native projects and deps so there are some “hard problems” not unique to Cordova here
Oh I have no doubt the grass isn't purely greener on the Flutter side. There's a ton of moving parts here for any solution to deal with.
Capacitor does look really nice--it was in early beta (maybe even alpha) last time I started a new app project, haven't looked since. Will definitely give it a fair shake when the opportunity arises.
EDIT:
Adding a bit context to my earlier comment: one of the bigger points of frustration in managing dependencies was figuring out which versions of ionic, ionic-native, ionic/angular, angular, and angular's 6 dozen peer deps actually work together.
Definitely doesn't help that I don't use Angular or Ionic on a regular basis, but documenting the expected versions of other components would be a huge help for me.
