Electron is a full instance of chromium. Running an electron app is essentially running a browser, which is a heavy application. All that heft translates to inefficiency.
In that case, I would expect a large difference in memory footprint, although both options would be bad in terms of having a non-native user interface and user experience.
Is this incorrect?
Unless I'm missing something that I really don't understand...
I was quite keen on chrome apps, as they allowed you to share the chrome browser runtime in a similar way. If you add a native desktop shortcut, and use the chrome-hiding features then you can basically replace electron with a shared runtime. I have a dim memory that it may have been killed/hobbled now though...