I introduced this in baafbc2, as a workaround for react-navigation/react-navigation#5713 which we were about to hit with the upcoming upgrade #3399 of RN from v0.57 to v0.59. (The workaround was suggested in a helpful comment there.)

The issue thread sounds like the issue is fixed in a later release of react-navigation. We're on a quite old release, 1.6.1. Before fixing this, we likely need to upgrade to react-navigation v3: #3573 . There's some partial work toward an upgrade in #2702 and #3502 .