Why would native apps be so expensive? Are they 10x slower to write? Isn't the tooling etc for making a WPF app at least as good as it is for electron? Obviously if you have a web app or node backend already you might have code you can re use but that's not the case generally. Just being able to not use Js should be a pretty big win (although .ts is also available for electron I suppose). Not to mention that libraries etc are specifically created for desktop and not web (e.g the xaml layout model vs the DOM). Or are they expensive because traditional desktop devs are hard to find and/or cost more?

I think it's sad that both Apple and Microsoft dropped the ball on desktop because they are only focusing on funneling users to their stores. If the Microsoft of 2017 (with open source .NET and Linux as a focus) had been around a few years ago when WPF was invented, they could have made a decent cross platform toolkit now that didn't come from html/CSS/js