While true, it also had plenty of limitation. You have to keep carrying around a huge legacy, you're locked in to the APIs, SDKs and operating systems of a single vendor, often locked themselves to a single type of hardware.
The win32 code doesn't run anywhere, except on Windows, but most of the compute devices are mobile (non-laptop) systems and those don't come with Windows.
Running your native apps now takes both less work and more work: you can write (Somewhat) universal code but the frameworks and layers required to get it to build and run on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and any other system the market you target relies on now comes in as a dependency.
It used to be that the context you worked in was all you needed to know, and delivery and access was highly top-down oriented meaning you'd have to get the system (OS, hardware) to run the product (desktop app). That is no longer the case as people already have a system and will select the product (app) based on availability. If you're not there, that market segment will simply ignore you.
That is not to say that desktop apps have no place, or that CEF is the solution to all the cross-platform native woes (it's not, it's the reason things have gotten worse), but the very optimised and optimistic way to writing software from the 90's is not really broadly applicable anymore.
The win32 code doesn't run anywhere, except on Windows, but most of the compute devices are mobile (non-laptop) systems and those don't come with Windows.
Running your native apps now takes both less work and more work: you can write (Somewhat) universal code but the frameworks and layers required to get it to build and run on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and any other system the market you target relies on now comes in as a dependency.
It used to be that the context you worked in was all you needed to know, and delivery and access was highly top-down oriented meaning you'd have to get the system (OS, hardware) to run the product (desktop app). That is no longer the case as people already have a system and will select the product (app) based on availability. If you're not there, that market segment will simply ignore you.
That is not to say that desktop apps have no place, or that CEF is the solution to all the cross-platform native woes (it's not, it's the reason things have gotten worse), but the very optimised and optimistic way to writing software from the 90's is not really broadly applicable anymore.