The really crazy thing is that the group that eventually birthed Rust had an acceptably performant Electron alternative even before Electron existed—and it supported both HTML and native-ish looking widgets. But they completely underinvested in it and eventually killed it—insisting that they knew better and that no one really needed or wanted it. In the meantime, Electron came along and is now so ridiculously pervasive that it's regularly brought up in conversation—even where its of very little relevance—just as a consequence of people looking to complain about how popular it is. The only thing we hear from the former group who strangled their baby, though, is how dire the outlook is for them and their influence on the future of computing.