when you run expo publish with a recent version of expo-cli from a bare project it will automatically set the target to “bare” which results in excluding any .expo.js files. this means that the file with this error message would not be included in your bundle. you can see the target when you run the publish command:
╭─~/code/brentapp ‹master›
╰─$ expo publish
- Release channel: default
- Workflow: Bare
if you publish from a branch where you haven’t ejected and see Workflow: managed on running the command then it will not be compatible with your binary. i don’t know exactly what happened in your case but i suspect something like this
you can remove the expo package if you like. it’s main purposes here are to make it so imports from the package continue to work and you can continue using expo client if you want.