Can relate. My work laptop was enough for every task I could throw at it...

Until I had to work with Angular apps. Then I suddenly needed twice the cores, twice the RAM. I was honestly surprised.

Looking at the resulting code, I also have no trouble believing this cost is also brought on to users of Angular apps.

For a framework which (IMO) brings so little, the overhead seems surprisingly large.

Ah, the good old "you're/they're using it wrong" excuse.

That's part of the problem. Even a hyper optimized Electron app will consume a non trivial amount of RAM. The other factor is that Electron is accessible to people who don't have experience with developing desktop applications. They make some mistakes with a big impact on the user experience. Additionally, the NPM community isn't exactly known for producing few large profile high quality libraries. Instead you just cobble something together by using thousands of small packages with little to no accountability.