"near-free", I would not call hogging gigabyte of RAM a "near free" experience.

near free to the developer. That's a very important part of "can we afford to produce this software?"

Will you pay $100 or more extra to get a true native version instead of electron? If not, why would they go to the extra work of developing one?

Its dirt cheap. We've all been running discord in the background for how long now.