I think people are talking past each other.

Yes. Electron enables some new stuff. New stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise.

Yes. Electron is a bucket of bloat that saddles what should be small, simple apps with enormous amounts of crap that has nothing to do with the app's functionality.

Both of these can be (and are) true.

I think that's the real take-away here. There are upsides and downsides; I am pleased that it is easier to release desktop applications, but sad that the performance of them is so much worse.

I wonder if one of the issues is that so many developers have now worked almost exclusively in the 'web' sphere, and aren't aware that native development maybe isn't as difficult as they think.

Perhaps someone with both native and web development can set me straight on this; I have very basic knowledge of the former.

I've done the latter for a long time now, and only now I'm trying to teach some people, I properly realize much knowledge is needed to do it right. It's not just arcane knowledge of the quirks of CSS/HTML/JS, but also tooling, build steps, knowledge of 'expected' web behavior, frameworks, libraries, etc. Much of this complexity is still there and often worse if you go for vanilla js and static html/css (in part because expectations of a web app are higher these days).

I started learning native iOS development and expected things to be much easier and more sensible, but instead I get the impression that it's not that different.

Xcode is apparently a piece of shit, and everyone tells me to avoid Xcode's interface builder. There's tons to learn about how a project is set up, as well as stuff that just isn't a concern for the web like packaging it up submitting to the app store (hours just figuring out how to correctly supply icons and get a certificate). More than once, as I'm following an online course, the lecturer will say something like 'this might seem like a logical approach, but DON'T DO THIS and do <unintuitive thing x> instead.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong. Perhaps when you put it all together it is significantly easier than doing the equivalent on a web platform. I'm just saying that I expected my initial foray into native, in particular Apple's 'walled garden', to be at least a little more like an actual garden rather than the chaotic, exceptions-for-every-rule (but kinda fun!) scrap-heap of the web I am familiar with.

On the plus side, this is an ideal situation to take advantage of - by creating native and fast applications, it becomes easier (compared to before when everyone was doing it "the hard way") to distinguish your product in a bloated market.

Not sure if ironic, seems a sure bet most users won't notice and gladly prefer the "bloated" product.

Yet to hear a single non-dev coworker complain about Spotify being "bloated".

Sorry, I should of been a bit more clear. I meant demanding applications.