The expectations of apps have skyrocketed too which is why everyone is using Electron to cope. If GUI development were still as easy as the drag and drop builders in Delphi 7 and VB6 with a bunch of static 800x600 monitors and double-click to edit component code-behind, we’d be shoehorning fewer apps into HTML and making more desktop apps.

I remember how big of a pain in the ass Windows distribution (alone) was in the 2000s with entire businesses like InstallShield built around it. Tack compatibility testing on top of that and a desktop app for a single OS because a massive effort. With the web you could just upload PHP and off to the race. That slowly evolved into what we had today via jquery and electron and friends but what won was distribution and ease of development, despite all the handwringing people do about frontend. The grass isn’t greener on the other side and hasn’t been for decades.

It’s not even remotely competitive anymore. My favorite example is GoldenLayout: it takes me less than a few hours to read the docs and implement a full blown tabbed and split screen interface using a third party library and combine it with any framework I want like React, Svelte, or just vanilla JS. Each desktop framework have their own solutions to the problem usually in the form of commercial components but even in the best case, they take lots more time to wire together.