We make a single Electron-like app grow, cancer-like, to do everything from messaging and videoconferencing to shared drive browsing and editing, and as a result we have to contain it.
Native UI kits should be able to do better than web-based kits. But I suspect just as with the web, the problem is consistency. The one thing the web does right is deliver consistent UI experience across various hardware with less dev time. It all comes down to which method has least amounts of friction for devs? Large tech companies spent a lot of time and money in dev tooling for their web services, so web based approaches to solve problems inherently have to be taken for even trivial apps (not that teams is one).
Open source native UX kits that work consistently across platforms and languages would solve much of this. Unfortunately, the open source community is stuck on polishing gtk and qt.
Yet here we are, in an era where you can encounter multiple choices and you don't know whether it's a single select versus a multi-select tick box. And then there's something with a boolean state, and it's not clear which color means it's currently active. Then you hit alt-F for the File menu order to quit your browser in frustration, but the web page blocks you because it has decided that means that you're going to "Favorite" whatever you're looking at.
That is indeed the "problem" at its core. People are lazy, operating systems aren't consistent enough.
Operating systems came about to abstract all the differences of countless hardware away, but that is no longer good enough. Now people want to abstract away that abstraction: Chrome.
Chrome is the abstraction layer to Windows, MacOS, iOS, Linux, Android, BSD, C++, HTML, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Python, desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all the other things. You develop for Chrome and everyone uses Chrome and everyone on both sides gets the same thing for a singular effort.
If I were to step away from all I know and care about computers and see as an uncaring man, I have to admit: It makes perfect sense. Fuck all that noise. Code for Chrome and use by Chrome. The world can't be simpler.
I sometimes wonder if Chromium actually do any specific optimisation for Electrons related usage.
Then there is the fact that with native you need separate native app devs, familiar with tooling and environment, cause they totally different, so costs balloon. A lot. Not to mention a difficulty of hiring, compared to Electron.
There are practical reasons why Electron won, people are just ignorant of those reasons. If they poured their hate into solving the problem instead, we might have something decent already. But it's easier to complain. So here we are.
Personally, I'm annoyed, but understand why it is like it is.