You are not weird. More and more people think that Electron is bad
Electron applications such as Slack, Discord, and VS Code have ballooned in popularity over the last year or two. Hacker News comments are not representative of the whole.
So the choice becomes use an Electron app or something else entirely.
But I agree, it's almost never a choice, but it's a hypothetical
So in some ways I’d probably prefer a good Electron app.
For other things I'm far less keen as Electron is often a sign of a needless memory hog - 100M pomodoro timers and such like.
All other things will never be equal.
My point is that given two apps that both have the features a user considers "must have", few, if any, would pick the Electron one over the native, precisely because of the extra burden in cpu/memory/speed of Electron.
That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.
If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.
Is it possible that VS Code (for example) exists (in its feature specific incarnation ) only because Electron is a cost cutter in terms of portable development?
In other terms: Maybe the portable native full featured VS Code is the middle of the cheap-fast-good venn diagram.
It could -- though I doubt it.
But I was concerned with a more limited question: if there was a good VS Code alternative that's native, would many still prefer an Electron version?
I understood what you meant. I respect you disagreeing with my premise, but in the scenario where that premise is true, your question is not applicable.
Scenario: Would anyone choose MDF boards at IKEA if they could choose plywood or natural wood, or assemble their own furniture if given the choice (at the same price)? Barring a few applications, probably not. But IKEA wouldn't be IKEA if they were just another producer of wood furniture, meaning they got to market and stayed there because of the shortcuts and limitations they could justify when reaching a price.
Same thing here (IMHO). VS Code could have some cross-platform code and some platform specific code, but the cost would be higher and the output velocity would likely be lower. Assuming that is true, your question is misleading, albeit not on purpose.
There is sublime text.
A lot of it, yes. But VSCode also invests a lot in core functionality (in what in other platforms would be plugins). The Git integration is one such example -- or the ability to debug Chrome in it.
>That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.
But that's not true. I use Sublime Edit and have happily used BBEdit and TextMate. Emacs is fine for many people, and I still use vim for fast edits in terminal mode all the time. There are plenty of other great native editors for just about all platforms.