Near native performance - what a joke.
You're carting around an entire browser, it's so far from native that it's completely laughable.
As a point of reference: In 1984: MacPaint, 5,822 lines of Apple Pascal, 3583 lines of assembly QuickDraw (dependency): 17,101 lines, all assembly Compiled Size: 0.05MB
Today, Chrome: Number of lines of code: 16 MILLION Webkit (alone): 10.3 MILLION Install size: ~200MB
We have a bunch of people who aren't skilled enough to deal with a real machine who think they're still "near native". Every single thing won't be as fast, or as small, as the underlying hardware can be using toolkits and platforms that have been available for 20+ years (cross platform toolkits and Java both). For god's sake, Java is a portable VM! wxWidgets is cross-platform, and open source!
We accept an operating system in our way as it is, and now we accept not only an operating system, but an entire browser as well? Our computers are faster than supercomputers used to be - why does Photoshop (or ANY program) take so long to load?
We have to go the other direction - start removing all the garbage from computing, keep the best bits, throw the rest out. If you can't hack on a real computer, that's fine - you have the Webassembly sandbox. But don't label it "near native" - it just shows you don't care enough about computers to read about them. I hear that and it sounds like my gradma talking about computers - that same level of understanding. Nana is amazing, but she's not so great at computers. And these people are supposed to be developers?
As for the rest, I don't know how you're measuring. Photoshop runs a lot faster than programs on my Centris 610 did, and sure it's a bloated mess of different programs glommed together but guess what, it does a lot more than smaller programs do. Your comment counts the cost of everything and the value of nothing. You can't click a link and get a brand-new full-featured word processor running on an old Mac in 10 seconds like you can by clicking https://docs.google.com/ But I can run MacPaint in my browser thanks to asm.js https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation
Amazing how we ever got anything done without carting around an entire browser as an attack surface.
We end up with a FrankenMonster of an application, that has a cobbled together persona, built by people who do not appreciate what the machine is actually doing.
There are benchmarks. You can run them yourself.