> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."

The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung.

Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all features a native app can, without things like CORS, permission popups, browser extensions or god knows what else getting in your way.

But it should always be a prototype and eventually be shifted to native applications because in the end, unlike Internet Explorer in its heyday which you could trivially embed as ActiveX and it wouldn't lead to resource gobbling, if you now have ten apps consuming 1GB RAM each just for the Electron base to run, now the user runs out of memory because it's like PHP - nothing is shared.

Each person seems to have their own bugbear about Electron but I really doubt improving Electron to have shared instances a la WebView2 would make the much of a dent in the hate for it here.

Removing layers is hard though, better to have electron host a WASM application which will become a new "native" that gets argued semantically.

Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA. Which will have vastly less overhead. Because it is shared, because each of those 10 apps you mention would be (or could be, if they have ok data architecture) tiny.