Trouble with pod install of hermes engine on m1 mac - ruby

Question

I've created a React-Native application as of 0.70.6, went through the grief of cocoapods and everything that comes with development on Apple's silicon chips (M2) and got it working and have done quite a bit of work on the project, and then (after creating a GitHub repo) handed it off to a coworker to do some design work (who is on an M1) ...had many issues on their machine as well, but eventually got it working. Now, React-Native 0.71.0 has been released and I ran through all of the steps to upgrade it and got it working on my M2 machine, no issues at all, but after pushing and getting it on their machine, I have not been able to find a solution to the pod install failing due to the hermes-engine not being able to load, a couple of the errors that pop up are,
[!] Failed to load 'hermes-engine' podspec:
[!] Invalid `hermes-engine.podspec` file: undefined method 'exists?' for FileClass.
I have been searching all day for what this means (I am fairly new to React-Native ...and mobile development in general) and I've gathered that 'exists?' has been deprecated as of certain versions of ruby (I'm on 3.2.0) although, it runs fine on my machine, so I am confused as to what could be missing. I've been using chruby to install ruby, and the only difference there is that I have ruby versions 2.7.5 and 2.7.7 on my machine ... but of course, there are flags that I had to set in order to actually be able to install them on my machine and I don't believe they affect my project since bundle install and pod install works using 3.2.0.
To list out what all I have installed on these machines:
bundler -> 2.4.1
cocoapods -> 1.11.3
ruby -> 3.2.0
node -> 18.13.0
xcode -> 14.2 (with command line tools)
Another bit of error reporting, in case it is useful:
Command `pod install` failed.
└─ Cause: Failed to load 'hermes-engine' podspec:
[!] Invalid `hermes-engine.podspec` file: undefined method `exists?' for File:Class.
# from /Users/<user>/projects/<app_dir>/node_modules/react-native/sdks/hermes-engine/hermes-engine.podspec:46
# -------------------------------------------
# source[:http] = "file://#{destination_path}"
> elsif File.exists?(hermestag_file) && isInCI
# Pod::UI.puts '[Hermes] Detected that you are on a React Native release branch, building Hermes from source but fetched from tag...'.yellow if Object.const_defined?("Pod::UI")
# -------------------------------------------
If there is any information that I need to include for clarity, I will update this post as need-be.
I've tried removing the Pods file, and then pod install... same error
Removed Podfile.lock, cache clean AND removing Pods... same error
Removing node_modules/ npm cache clean --force && npm install
then doing npx pod-install to hopefully let node handle things... same error
Ran pod deintegrate and pod install... was scary, broke things, so reverted, back to square 1
There are other things that I've tried earlier today that I cannot remember, and they've gone home, so I can't access all the commands I ran, but these were the freshest, and until I get a more clear view, I'll be trying to get those flags that need to be set to install the older versions of ruby to see if that does anything
One last mention though, we also recently got an M1 Mac Mini, and I ran through all of the steps to get the project working...ended up in the same rut as the other M1, but again, will be trying those LD_FLAGS or whatever it may be and update this thread if that is what fixes the issue
Looking at older issues related to these, people found work-arounds using -x86_64 commands, and I've managed to get this far without any since maintainers have released newer versions with arm64 support, but if I need it anywhere, so be it, I'll take what I can get at this point

Answer 1

Without needing to install other versions of ruby or anything, I got it install the hermes-engine pod by doing something I find dirty...which is just go into that file it mentions and remove the 's' in exists? so it just says exist? and then I also downgraded cocoapods from 1.11.3 to 1.11.2 and seeing how that .podspec file is laid out, it conditionally loads the engine by first seeing if is downloaded on the machine, and then once it sees that it is not, that's where it eventually hits this problem code with the exists conditional...so it downloaded everything and worked fine and I was able to build and run my app on the mac mini...but when trying the same steps on the other m1 machine, I got a very useful error -- Oh no, an error occured ...perfect, and now I am questioning if these changes I have made will effect the M2 pod commands
If there is no better answer provided in the next few days, I'll assume this is the best possible fix until react-native upgrades their ruby version to 3.2.0 which after some more digging...is the exact release that this exists? file method was removed
But would still love feedback for anyone else using an M1 MacBook who has had these issues on the stable release of React-Native 0.71.0