tbh this is the main thing I was looking for on the webpage. It's hard for me to jump ship from my existing workflows unless I see a professional and highly sophisticated app example. I am sure it works for simple cases but I am concerned about limitations that one hits as one does more complex things
Out of curiosity, what are your existing workflows?
Note that Skip doesn't put any constraints on the iOS side of your app at all: if it can be expressed with SwiftUI or UIKit, then you can do anything. If there are bits that SkipUI doesn't translate to your liking (or at all), you can always drop down directly into Kotlin and Jetpack Compose to implement those any way you want. See https://skip.tools/docs/platformcustomization/ for details.
To answer the other part of your question: you don’t manually edit the generated Kotlin. Instead there are mechanisms for writing Kotlin inline in your Swift, dropping Kotlin files into the project, and other platform customization options: https://skip.tools/docs/platformcustomization/
The Skip transpiler runs locally on every build. It is implemented as an Xcode build plugin, so it is transparent and instantaneous. Every change you make to the Swift code is immediately converted into Kotlin, so each time you launch the app in the iPhone Simulator, the Android app will launch next to it in the Android Emulator. For a good overview of this process, take a look at: https://skip.tools/tour/skip-showreel/