It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Maui effort will be able to compete with Electron using a somewhat more native approach. I suspect that it will not.
I agree. The reason Electron got popular is because front end devs can quickly build a desktop app for use cases where a web app will not work.
And I say that as a web dev who has worked on probably a dozen apps with Electron. Mostly internal tools, but also stuff in production for end users.
For the end user projects we ended up replacing Electron with native apps using the native web view. Each app had a tiny native layer for stuff like downloading files, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers but our macOS app went from +100MB to about 5MB download. Memory usage was also great reduced. The macOS app barely used something like 15MB of RAM IIRC. That was in 2018. Today there are projects that already do this.
I think Maui will rather compete with Flutter and QT, not Electron.
