Electron isn't all that bad honestly. The bad part is people slap the same pile of massive and bloated node modules and framework in it that's the same cause as to why the modern web is so horrible.

A well written web app in Electron can feel quite good and snappy. It's just that the companies that own most of those apps don't care and won't give the developers time to build an optimized app, because that doesn't bring in money, but new features do.

Especially if you share the system electron runtime between apps, even the memory overhead isn't all that bad even compared to modern toolkits like GTK4 and Qt5/6.

But then you load like 5MB of poorly written CSS and a 10MB JS bundle plus all the assets and full screen background image and yeah, it'll chew through resources fast.

Sometimes when I have to debug a modern website, I'm amazed at the amount of crap it's there. Just checking the inspector in the browser, half the elements have hundreds of overriden CSS rules and hacks to make it display correctly instead of writing the CSS proper. Boatload of unnecessary divs and whatnot everywhere. That strains any layout engine.

The profiler in the browser console? Yeah nobody uses it, or even knows it exists and how to use it. I wow'd a lot of people just making a quick flamegraph and speeding up the code 10x like it's nothing.

We have the tools, but not the will to optimize.