The waste of slow JS bundles is nothing compared to the cost of bloated interpreted runtimes or inefficient abstractions. Most production software is multiple orders of magnitude slower than it needs to be. Just look at all the electron apps that use multiple GB of ram doing nothing and are laggier than similar software written 40 years ago despite having access to an incredibly luxurious amount of resources from any sane historical perspective.

Something I realized while doing more political campaign work is how inefficient most self hosted solutions are. Things like plausible or umami (analytics) require at least 2 gigs of ram, postiz (scheduled social media planner) requires 2 gigs of ram, etc.

It all slowly adds up where you think a simple $10 VPS with 2 gigs of ram is enough but it's not, especially if you want a team of 10-30ish to work sporadically within the same box.

There can be a lot of major wins by rewriting these programs in more efficient languages like Go or Rust. It would make self hosting more maintainable and break away from the consulting class that often has worse solutions at way higher prices (for an example, one consulting group sells software similar to postiz but for $2k/month).

I guess there's the distinction between capacity that could be taken up by other things, and free capacity that doesn't necessarily cost anything.

For a server built in the cloud those cycles could actually be taken up by other things, freeing the system and bringing costs down.

For a client computer running electron, as long as the user doesn't have so many electro apps open that their computer slows down noticeably, that inefficency might not matter that much.

Another aspect is that the devices get cheaper and faster so today's slow electron app might run fine on a system that is a few years away, and that capacity was never going to be taken up by anything else on the end user's device.