This is complete nonsense. You clearly haven't used Feathers. I can assure you that Feathers does indeed provide realtime functionality and have code examples to back up that statement.
I started playing with this recently and so far I'm loving it. Here's a Vue.js component example I wrote that interacts (CRUD operations) with a Feathers message service over websockets: https://gist.github.com/niallobrien/7eb51d17c977c46babb8
Scaling Meteor is my biggest concern right now as I contemplate diving any deeper with it. I'm well aware of Mongo's oplog but the lack of Mongo sharding, the sticky session requirement, server resource consumption (RAM required per client), lack of proper offline support (last write wins) and sheer devops work required to scale is off-putting. Hopefully tomorrow's release of the remaining Bulletproof Meteor content will ease my worries. But I cannot shake the feeling that in terms of cost, something like Firebase would work out to be much more cost efficient.
Also, the whole ecosystem of wrappers is plain silly. It feels like the MDG & the community are just reinventing the wheel time & time again. Oh we got Cordova support? What's that exactly other than some CLI tools? Of course any web tech should support Cordova, that's what it's built for. The Ionic Framewoek are light years ahead in this regard.