Well, back in the day you had 4 megs of ram, MS-DOS and other OSes that are simple as they come, and full access to the hardware.

These days if you want to support macOS, Windows, Linux: I say good luck to you, Electron can save you there.

Electron is not crap, but many javascript developers are crap. You can make fast and memory efficient apps in Electron, if you know how to code.

(Note: Slack or Discord developers don't have that skill)