I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.
Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.
Other people have also looked into things like that: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.
Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.
In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.
Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.
Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.
Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.
I propose that all the apps you use that you find good you assume are native, but possibly some of those are not.
You are still paying performance for using web apps, and even though your fingers don’t feel it as badly, your battery sure does.
This makes no sense. If webapps run without a loss in performance, then you don't need increased hardware performance in order to see the difference.
> [...] compared to native apps.
This simply isn't true. Run a well-designed webapp and a well-designed native app on the same platform. You'll see a difference in performance.
> you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.
I'm still waiting to see even one example of this.
> Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower.
True. But it comes at a cost to quality.