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The same reason your desktop based email client probably depends on it. It’s 2020 and developers are starting to make use of all the modern browser features. It’s time to stop thinking like the browser is some fickle thing that needs to be caressed and treat it like a sandboxed OS environment for delivering apps and content.

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We had rich desktop email clients - with more features than GMail - running on sub-GHz CPUs with integrated graphics. They also had better UI.

Obviously native code is faster than a generalized scripting language for the web. Again, it's all about what you're trying to achieve. You can still use those fast native clients, but you can also access your Gmail from any device that has a web browser, which is basically everything. If Gmail is slow today, then obviously Google has lost sight of that point.

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