Compared to winforms, WPF has an incredibly steep learning curve. Working with it was always painful to me. The vector graphics architecture they mention makes it even harder. While it's rich capabilities enable you to implement everything you can dream of, doesn't the same hold for JS desktop apps? (+ they are cross platform) I don't see the use case anymore...
We developed a number of applications on it, but found it to be very verbose, quite brittle and needlessly complex. It is brittle because XAML itself is a compiled language without the ability to step through or debug well, which means runtime errors in the object tree usually causes the entire app to crash with very abstract error messages. it is complex because the language is supposed to be an object tree building…
This is absolutely untrue. Xaml errors can be caught like any other error, and most errors get swallowed rather than crash the application (which can cause some debugging headaches when things aren't rendering as you expect).
> I used to think XAML could be better if architected well, but the missing ecosystem and usage around it made it so, that HTML was and still is massively more productive.
I don't think html is massively more productive. I'm not even saying that WPF is so much better, but start debugging any reasonably large react application and you're just as likely to get into an unproductive quagmire.