React Native had hot reloading a year before Flutter was announced. Not to take anything away from Flutter (I heard it's great!) Personally I'm rooting for all declarative UI libraries and platforms, and I'm very excited Flutter is getting traction.
eh. The wrong type of typo can take down the entire app. Other typos it can recover from. Trying to change redux components just doesn't work. All in all it isn't too hard to fool RN's hot loading.
I'd also note that hot loading is turned off by default for RN! I can see why, having it on I have to know what types of things I can use it with and what types of changes will need a full relaunch.
Let's not even get into the "reload" button and what that may or may not do. (Note: I am using expo, so I have an additional layer of bugs and abstraction on top, having to force close Expo on the phone is way too common in my experience)