A lot of the docs prioritize ease of getting started and EAS has a free plan generous enough to get you to production and often beyond. The Expo CLI docs have a section on building locally here: https://docs.expo.dev/more/expo-cli/#building

"npx expo prebuild" (covered in that link) is a good command to know. It generates "android" and "ios" directories with your Android Studio and Xcode projects, respectively. These projects can be built entirely locally and there is no dependency on EAS.

As a side note, the old "expo build" command also ran on hosted servers. It was part of the old Expo CLI, which, for historical reasons from six or seven years ago, didn't separate the free & open source Expo framework from the hosted offering. We built EAS years later, with a major new feature being support for builds that have custom native code. Keeping EAS decoupled from Expo has been a conscious effort, and we've also designed EAS to work with any React Native app whether it uses Expo or not.

I guess I'm just saying it would be nice to have an actual "expo build" command that can build the app locally (assuming Android Studio and Xcode are in place), to complete the full Expo framework experience, instead of using expo prebuild and letting the user deal with Android Studio and Xcode manually.

Then again, I can understand why it isn't a priority for the company.