react-native: `View.getGlobalVisibleRect()` is broken in some use cases

🐛 Bug Report

With respect to the list of these commits - all of which involve child-views clipping on Android (AKA the overflow functionality): https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/b81c8b, https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/6110a4c, https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/bbdc12e, https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/9c71952;

While in essence the approach makes sense for introducing overflow toggling support, having view-group components’ clip-children flag hard-codedly set to false creates undesired side-effects. One of which is the breaking of the logic of the native View.getGlobalVisibleRect() method. In some cases – as illustrated by the screenshot from a demo app I’ve worked out for this, the native method will return true for views that were effectively properly clipped by ReactViewGroup, and are in fact not visible on the screen.

In that specific use case, while the view-group holding the upper part of the screen (gray background) is limited in height, the scroll view stretches all the way down to the bottom of the screen. This way, items 14…17 are drawn under the lower part of the screen (blue), and - as far as Android is concerned, are NOT clipped by the parent view-group – as it’s clip-children flag is off.

Note: the bug persists even if ScrollView is removed from the hierarchy.

Among other potential functionalities, this stability of the View.getGlobalVisibleRect() method is paramount for ui-testing projects to work – such as https://github.com/wix/Detox (the one I’m working on right now) and that is already integrated into React Native itself (for iOS).

To Reproduce

The demo app is available on github

Expected Behavior

View.getGlobalVisibleRect() should return false for views that were clipped off by one of their view-group parents.

Code Example

From the demo app:

• A screen layout where this bug occurs
• The native logic that runs ‘under the hood’ in order to show the bug is there.

Environment

info 
  React Native Environment Info:
    System:
      OS: macOS 10.14.3
      CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz
      Memory: 409.30 MB / 16.00 GB
      Shell: 3.2.57 - /bin/bash
    Binaries:
      Node: 9.11.2 - ~/.nvm/versions/node/v9.11.2/bin/node
      Yarn: 1.3.2 - /usr/local/bin/yarn
      npm: 6.8.0 - ~/.nvm/versions/node/v9.11.2/bin/npm
      Watchman: 4.9.0 - /usr/local/bin/watchman
    SDKs:
      iOS SDK:
        Platforms: iOS 12.1, macOS 10.14, tvOS 12.1, watchOS 5.1
      Android SDK:
        API Levels: 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
        Build Tools: 19.1.0, 20.0.0, 21.1.2, 22.0.1, 23.0.1, 23.0.2, 23.0.3, 24.0.1, 25.0.0, 25.0.1, 25.0.2, 25.0.3, 26.0.0, 26.0.1, 26.0.2, 26.0.3, 27.0.1, 27.0.3, 28.0.0, 28.0.2, 28.0.3
        System Images: android-16 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-19 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-22 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-22 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom_64, android-23 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom_64, android-25 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom_64, android-26 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-26 | Google Play Intel x86 Atom, android-28 | Google Play Intel x86 Atom
    IDEs:
      Android Studio: 3.3 AI-182.5107.16.33.5199772
      Xcode: 10.1/10B61 - /usr/bin/xcodebuild
    npmPackages:
      react: 16.8.3 => 16.8.3 
      react-native: 0.59.0 => 0.59.0 
    npmGlobalPackages:
      react-native-cli: 2.0.1