Software 30 years ago was more amenable to theming. The more system widgets you use, the more effective theming works by swapping them.

Now, we have grudging dark-mode toggles that aren't consistent or universal, not even rising to the level of configurabilty you got with Windows 3.1 themes, let alone things like libXaw3d or libneXtaw where the fundamental widget-drawing code could be swapped out silently.

I get the impression that since about 2005, theming has been on the downturn. Windows XP and OSX both were very close to having first class, user-facing theming systems, but both sort of chickened out at the last minute, and ever since, we've seen less and less control every release.

I think what you're describing as "theming" is more "custom UI". It used to be reserved for games, where stock Windows widgets broke immersion in a medieval fantasy strategy simulator and you were legally obliged to make the cursor a gauntlet or sword. But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!" when your application is a smart-bulb controller or a text editor that could perfectly well fit with native widgets.

A word of praise for Go: it is pretty performant, while using very little memory. I inherited a few Django apps, and each thread just grows to 1GB. Running something like celery quickly eats up all memory and start thrashing. My Go replacements idle at around 20MB, and are a lot faster. It really works.

...and this effort and small savings here and there is what brings the massive savings at the end of the day. Electron is what "4KB here and there won't hurt", "JS is a very dynamic language so we can move fast", and "time to market is king, software is cheap, network is reliable, YOLO!" banged together. It's a big "Leeroy Jenkins!" move in the worst possible sense, making users pay everyday with resources and lost productivity to save a developer a couple of hours at most.

Users are not cattle to milk, they and their time/resources also deserve respect. Electron is doing none of that.

> You quoted where i said that modern resolutions are literally orders of magnitude greater and assets stored in bitmaps / PCM then totally ignored that point.

Did you watch or ran any of these demos? Some (if not all) of them scale to 4K and all of them have more than two colors. All are hardware accelerated, too.

> And modern graphics aren’t limited to 2 colour sprites (more colours were achieved via palette swapping) at 8x8 pixels. Scale that up to 32bits (not colours, bits) and you’re increasing the colour depth by literally 32 times. And that’s before you scale again from 64 pixels to thousands of pixels.

Sorry to say that, but I know what graphics and high performance programming entails. Had two friends develop their own engines, and I manage HPC systems. I know how much memory matrices need, because everything is matrices after some point.

> Safety nets are not a waste.

I didn't say they are waste. That quote is out of context. Quoting my comment's first paragraph, which directly supports the part you quoted: "Yes, but this doesn't prevent you from being mindful and selecting the right tools with smaller memory footprint while providing the features you need."

So, what I argue is, you don't have to bring in everything and the kitchen sink if all you need is a knife and a cutting board. Bring in the countertop and some steel gloves to prevent cutting yourself.

> I’ve written software for those 80s systems and modern systems too. And it’s simply ridiculous to Compare graphics and audio of those systems to modern systems without taking into account the differences in resolution, colour depth, and audio bitrates.

Me too. I also record music and work on high performance code. While they are not moving much, I take photos and work on them too, so I know what happens under the hood.

Just watch the demos. It's worth your time.