Local first isn’t limited to web apps. It’s a style of application development in which you locally store and operate on the data rather than fetching it from a cloud backend every time. For native apps that means a local database or individual files on the file system.

> phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source, etc.

This describes proprietary software developed by capitalist companies. This has nothing to do with local first.

I think most native apps (at least that I use) are local first. I can't think of a single one that requires a consistent internet connection to function, that otherwise could run locally. The whole "local-first" trend that has cropped up lately was at least partially influenced by web apps like Linear and Figma, and if you look at the libraries and writing being produced on this topic it's almost exclusively Javascript and about making crud web apps local-first.