> I feel like this is one of the under-appreciated reasons why the web is taking over desktop apps. It's so much easier to build a web app that runs with native extensions than it is to build a native app with almost any toolkit.

I disagree. Microsoft's WPF to me feels like GUI development done right. Designing UI components is a first-class citizen and even has WYSIWYG support, rendering data with observers is also a first class citizen with it's data binding feature, styling is also supported right out of the box, etc.

In theory frameworks like React sound nice, but once developers start to pour hooks left and right and add conditionals and move service client calls into trees then at least to me it quickly becomes an unreadable and unmaintainable mess.

Qt is pretty good to setup a widget tree, but it's model-view implementation feels broken and not thought through, specially with tables and trees.