> Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps.

Even so, there is a stark difference, even more so on low-powered devices, between native apps and even the lightest of browser apps. I'm traditionally a web developer, but started developing native cross-platform applications the last 6-12 months, and the performance gap is pretty big even for simple stuff, strangely enough.

My experience too, and that's not even touching the disproportionately high RAM usage of frameworks like Electron. Sure, "unused RAM is wasted RAM", until the system starts swapping heavily because of the high RAM usage.

It doesn't even have to be old devices, there are still laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM in 2026.