alt Hacker NewsThere's a comment somewhere on HN from a Slack dev who was the one responsible for moving away from platform-specific webviews to Electron. The core reason is that Electron is the same on all platforms it ships on, generally speaking.
Platform-specific views simply aren't. For simple applications they might make sense, but at a certain point devs just want the shit to work. Electron solved that.
I do agree that LLMs & co should contribute to reversing this trend, though. I don't really see why you couldn't try to ship (true) native now.
In the evergreen (and generally broadly much better) browser age this is an assumption / concern that I think could really use some reconsideration, lol.
Maybe once we didn't dare surmount the challenge, but today, the landscape is a lot better (and a lot less chaotic) and while yeah it sort of sucks in some annoying ongoing ways I can't imagine every org is going to find this some insurmountable difficult strenuous activity. Like, get good.
The anti-will against doing this drives people away from the web as platform.