Yes it is. Whenever you open a common app whose interface is janky, uses a ton of memory, doesn't load all views as instantly as you expect a desktop app to and needs to frequently refresh itself you know you're using electron. Think slack and spotify, the article doesn't mention it but I'm sure Tidal is too because it behaves in exactly the same way.

The only program that seems to be doing rather well seems to be Visual Code. It's fast and responsive, and one of the main advantages of it using Electron is that it got a fully cross-platform plugin system almost for free. Given the importance of that application in my daily work, I don't mind it using a few hundred MB ram. I have other critical tools running that consume way more than that.

But that's about the only electron app I really like to use that I use on a daily basis. Many of the other things like slack, discord, spotify, ... are more of a nuisance, and are more 'background' applications for me. Justifying blowing a Gb or 2 of ram on these is hard. I currently already use Franz (also electron) to replace all the "chat" applications, which is tolerable given that it replaces a few things, but still not a huge fan.

> Is electron currently still the bloated beast it was a few years ago?

yes