It's simply a matter of what those variables are. A sick leave application form that get's used a few times a year? Stick that on the web, the installation cost isn't worth it. A productivity tool that's used all day, every day by a lot of people? Make that a desktop application, especially if you need local resources, like files. An application used by millions world wide everyday? Write that in a natively compiled language and use the native (or decent cross platform) UI, there's no reason your productivity is more important than the millions of users.
We're talking corporate intranets though, so a PC (or occasionally mac) will be the norm because that's required for productivity apps. Most things simple enough to be a touch screen app would fit into the category of also being simple enough for a web app. As I said, web apps are a good choice for simple and/or rarely used apps.
Irrelevant side story: For my second ever paid programming job (which only lasted a few weeks for other reasons) I was handed a fairly complex windows mobile app to learn. The app loaded every table in the windows CE database into memory when it started, which took about 15 seconds. Within a couple of days I'd modified this to load on demand instead, cutting start times to zero and impressing the boss.
As for the stack, c# and winforms is a good bet, particularly if you need to target older versions of windows. If you need a bit more performance or cross platform support then c++ and qt would be better. You could go c++ and win32, but MS dropped the ball on creating a nice api.
Deployments are another area MS dropped the ball, click once is sort of ok if you are using visual studio, but either way chocolatey is better. You may want something better for release management, in which case look into octopus deploy. These suggestions apply to electron apps as well.
Basically, had windows XP come with a better programming APIs (more like qt/gtk) and a better deployment model then web apps would have never been a thing. OSS has made windows a viable desktop.