From a programming perspective, modern desktop UI libraries are much more powerful and have less limitations. How you use that power is up to you and your UXD, however.
The standard desktop design paradigms were built by programmers for programmers - a lazy way to approach things leading to clunky to use software. The dog eat dog world of the web and rise of touch has forced us to turn to designers to play a huge role in simplifying interfaces and flows.
Agree with your opinions, though, you old fart.
UI design and HCI has been a thing for 4+ decades.
The web is a very poor example of those things -- not to mention it has forgotten decades of research and best practices.
What it has is just ubiquity and easy access.
If the original statement was "I prefer Electron for my desktop apps over Qt/Wx/GTK/etc." I could totally understand that. But the original comment was "My 'go to GUI' is a web app". That's not the same thing. It is our modern version of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
No. I've written GUI software, and tools for building GUI software[1], in the past.
NeXTSTEP was fun. Frankly, its still easier to develop for OPENSTEP 4.x then the web. VB when it first came out was amazing and all the VBX control you could buy were amazing. Heck, even the Newton was a lot cleaner to build a UI which still amazes me since Javascript should have been capable of the same type of prototype-based interface.
Text editor, document editor -> VS Code/Atom
terminal emulator -> Google's terminal emulator
git GUI client -> GitHub client is electron based
chat client -> slack is electron based
games -> lots of web based