What? Let's not rewrite history. I has been easy and cheap to create desktop UIs for decades, literally. I was using Borland Delphi 1.0 as a 13 year old and could have a basic Windows UI app up and running in ten minutes.
There have been many great cross-platform and platform-specific toolkits that are easy to use. E.g. you can teach someone with some Python knowledge how to make basic Qt desktop applications in one hour or so. It's literally as simple as dragging some widgets to a window and writing some lines of wrapper code.
I recommend anyone who thinks that developing applications using web UIs is easier/cheaper to look at some Delphi 1.0 videos. E.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_3K_0vjUhk
This was how we developed desktop applications 22 years ago on machines with 4 or 8 MB RAM. And it is still a whole lot easier and more efficient than a web app.
Additionally, Microsoft has their own framework similar to what QML offers: WPF. The problem with it is that it doesn't have cross platform support, something they wanted to have for VSCode.
It's all exhorbitantly easy to use. Cost is not the issue, specially since they already have a lot of really talented people working on VS Code.