There's a comment somewhere on HN from a Slack dev who was the one responsible for moving away from platform-specific webviews to Electron. The core reason is that Electron is the same on all platforms it ships on, generally speaking.

Platform-specific views simply aren't. For simple applications they might make sense, but at a certain point devs just want the shit to work. Electron solved that.

I do agree that LLMs & co should contribute to reversing this trend, though. I don't really see why you couldn't try to ship (true) native now.

There's Tauri, but (at least when I tried it last) it had bugs that made building functioning RPM packages extremely difficult. Bug(s) had been there for over a year at least with no momentum, so if you need to support rpm-based distros you're in for a rough time.

I mean if you look at all the frameworks that are trying to push towards native support across platorms, the ones that are took a pit stop at platform-native webviews, before going full native all have negative opinions of platform-native webviews. Besides all the tons of effort and buggy sharp corners there are across platforms, a lot of them just make really crappy UIs.

Most of the projects that I have seen are trying to push past that and get towards actual native-native (non-webview) rendering because despite being an even bigger pain and more work, they come out a lot better than the webviews.

1. Cross platform.

2. While browsers are pretty compatible nowadays, not having to deal with WebKit/Safari quirks is a plus.

3. The platform webview isn’t necessarily that much more efficient.

Business pressure. Always business pressure. Sales sold a bill of goods and now you need to deliver ASAP. Hardware was cheaper than dev time. Was.

Yes, they're getting their bonus. No, we can't hire and onboard more people to deal with the insane demands being made as a result. Why do you ask?