This is a response to Felix Rieseberg's defense of Electron. To be honest, I find no native framework able to fill in Electron's niche, but much has to be said against the bundling bloat of the framework.
I'd like to pitch in my experience with them, not as someone who can provide metrics to back it up, but as someone who used to compute in budget Celerons, Pentiums, and Atoms, and 4th-gen i3s. In fact, even if I have upgraded to beefier CPUs, I still have in my possession a refurbished dual-core Celeron chromebook running mint, and I love the rugged build as a writing laptop. You will not catch that laptop running VSCode or Obsidian. Damn the sale of these Celeron consumer tech to be criminal, and rightfully so, but a lot of these tech some people can only afford. And some of these 'incapable' tech are forced to run a lot of these 'essential' workspace electron apps.
And the refrain of just buy a new machine is never a valid counter especially to the non-tech consumer whose choices are more driven by budget and salestalk than online research. In the Philippines, new 8GB RAM laptops cost around 300 to 800 USD, and those contain entry-level CPUs, pentiums and i3s, none of octa-core plus workstations developers work in. Imagine those machines run tab-hoarded Chrome browser instances alongside electron apps in Windows 11 of all OSes. And sure, powerful workstation machines can be bought secondhand with those prices. But those stores are barely known. I only came to know my supplier from a local sale forum, whose mid-2000s design will appear sketchy in contrast to Facebook's UI. I doubt the ordinary consumer can look past these impressions.
And by the way, Joplin is built with Electron, but it does not have the same painful experience I have with VSCode even on my low-end machines. For me, Joplin shows that electron apps can be performant or appear to be so. But not VSCode. Not a plain install of Obsidian.
The grievance against Electron is similar to the grievance against AAA games with unreasonable requirements in disk space, RAM, and graphics. In a way, these frameworks enable and encourage the lack of optimization that make consumers needlessly suffer. Personally knowing that just buying a new machine might make Electron apps more tolerable just only goes to show how irrelevant the computing capacity of the less financially-privileged are treated as.
It is akin to an indirect planned obsolescence. One may be forgiven if the app's functions does demand the upgrade. But text editors? Basic tools? CRUD apps? Or any electron app that has a wide consumer base that includes those with lower income brackets? Browsers are already choking 4GB machines. Are you sure you want to add a text editor in a trimmed-down browser to that mix? If you answer me with "who runs 4GB computers nowadays", I am going to metaphorically slam my parent's 4GB i3 ideapad that is forced to run Teams and Chrome and Zoom and AnyDesk on your head.
Because just buying a new machine is never a good answer, even if it is a necessary one, thus the complaint against Electron shall rightfully remain.