It offers access to file system and system resources as well as multi platform build support. Developers like all people will whine over anything. For students and indie devs who have little time, support, and resources things like electron are great

Right, but does eg slack actually use any of that? It’s not a great native client by any stretch—it doesn’t use a native UI, it’s not particularly snappy, and it doesn’t do any special integration. So, it seems that electron is mostly a way to distinguish certain sites from others, not that they provide a better experience.

Granted I do like the distinct app icon. But electron should mean more than that to qualify as meaningfully native.

What electron gives Slack is A) local install and B) proper notifications.

So Slack gets an icon on the homescreen and possibly offline notification + notification integration with the OS.

That might be pretty limited from a technical perspective, but it's a massive product thing from a product perspective.

Also, it's possible they may use file access for caching/storage etc..

Not closing and losing your data when your chrome crashes?