basically this comes down to time and money. if you’re a hobbyist, you have lots of options available, but they take time to learn and you probably already know html. if you’re a professional, developer time is more expensive than cpu cycles and you probably already employ a web developer. unless there’s a good reason, most people won’t learn an entirely new GUI toolchain.
Electron apps ship their own chromium-based renderer, but ‘webview’ means the OS gets to use its own renderer. It’s still a browser-like environment, but at least the OS can choose the most performant one.
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is “the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes.” and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of “rubber-banding” effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will “drift” back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
I believe this is so they can make keyboards with a fancy “LinkedIn Button” on them, just like they’re trying to do now with Copilot.