How does installing cocoapods affect a project?

I have manually linked 4 libraries in a react-native project version 0.59.5, cocoapods are not currently installed and I want to install the react-native-admob package with the pod install. Im wondering what's going to happen to the manually linked libraries after the install?

Cocoapods is a dependency manager tool. When you run it, the xCode project is inserted into a holder .workspace and the pod dependencies are linked to that workspace.

Any library inserted manually on the project before the cocoapods integration is unaffected, because the build phase that links cocoapods named [CP] Embed Pods Frameworks is a different phase and happens after the manually added libraries build phase named Embed Frameworks:

The only difference is that you will need to run the .workspace file to compile the project.