> This is not as much a result of the superiority of the web stack for building applications (far from that, I don't think anyone disagrees that the web is a mess), as a failure of the current desktop UI frameworks. If people are preferring to ship a full web browser with their apps just so they can use great tools such as JavaScript (sarcasm) to build them, something must have gone terribly wrong.
This article so thoroughly misses the point of Electron. Furthermore the author's snark and condescension just serve to antagonize and attack rather than making any semblance of a point.
People choose Electron because it's easy to work with for people who are already comfortable with JavaScript. JS devs get to use tools like React, TypeScript, Webpack, Babel, and other tools they already understand and like. You have the entire wealth of tools of npm at your disposal. And since it's JS, you can share code between Electron, your website, and your Node server.
In addition to that, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript writing UIs is something thousands of us do every day do for a living. Being able to do that for a desktop application unlocked a whole world of development that previously was closed to only those comfortable with Objective C, C++, Java, and the like.
The author does a woefully inadequate job of explaining that choosing Electron is a _tradeoff_. You're trading a larger memory footprint, bigger artifact to distribute, and some extra performance challenges for the ability to write your application like a website in CSS, HTML and JS and have it work on every OS that Electron supports. For many this tradeoff is unacceptable but it's either incompetence or idiocy to not see that this tradeoff works for many of us.