The idea of this article is to merely showcase the usage of Compose side-effects with a practical example. Whether you choose to add a splash screen or not is totally up to you and your own use-case.

I am not familiar with any Google recommendations for not using splash screens. As far as I know, they've even added a new SplashScreen API to enhance the usage of splash screens in Android 12. Even their own applications make use of splash screens (see Gmail, for example).

Lastly, if you are losing 80% of your users in 90 days, I doubt that is based on the fact whether you have a splash screen or not :)