I have a similar issue, in prod each time the screen changes my RootLayout is rerender. It doesn't happen in dev mode but it happens when running with npx expo start --no-dev --minify . I tried with a new project from npx create-expo-app and just added this lines in the RootLayout and the problem still occure :

  const count = useRef(0);
  count.current += 1;
  alert(`RootLayout rendered ${count.current} times`);