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I was exploring a hard to debug memory leak in react native for at least 6 hours today. Turns out that when you don't add accessibilityLabel to RectButton or Pressable, it will fucking traverse all children to find a Text node or View with accessibilityLabel. This is insane. 1/4

Is this an actual memory leak? From the code samples, it looks like it should pile up some memory but then let that go. I agree this isn't a good default, and perhaps a dev-only warning saying "need an accessibility label on <view name>" would be best.

From 300MB to 7GB plus a full hang is even worse. Yeah, it’s not a leak, but an infinite traversal bug. In some very rare and not reliably reproducible cases, nested touchables can trigger this bug and completely freeze the app in our case. Adding a fallback `accessibilityLabel` did the trick.

FYI nested touchables are inaccessible as well.

Our FeedItem is actually a GestureDetector (handles play/pause and double-tap to like), and the RectButtons are placed on top of it—not even nested in the tree. We do have nested pressables, eg in lists where the whole item opens a sheet, but the avatar inside navigates to the profile instead.

On mac at least, you can check out the accessibility inspector since it works with the simulator. I'm definitely not an expert but I think the only way to make nested pressable actions available to accessibility tech would be to expose them as accessibilityActions on the outermost pressable.