Maybe these competent developers don't realize that lots of users don't care if their app use 100-200mo on an 8Go laptop. Nor do they realize that memory usage is one indicator among a few others that are as or more relevant to the various contexts: productivity, talent pool, cost, maintenance, etc. Trade-offs have to be made, Electron is one.
In the work environment (non-tech) I experienced several times that people complained about bad usability and apps slowing down the computer. More often than not, those were Electron apps. But the standard corporate solution is to just upgrade computers to 32gb ram and even faster processors. Not sure if the faster development speed in Electron still saves money then.
Don't get me wrong, I think Electron is generally a great idea. VSCode works great. Similar to websites, slow performance is rarely a fault of the underlying technology, it's a result of programmers not caring about performance.
Unless I've got Slack, Keybase, Spotify, etc open. Those just cripple the machine. Also Outlook, but I recently replaced it with Thunderbird and it seems to run much better. I find that my complaints are mostly met with accusations of being an old man (I'm 34...).
It's not that "HN hates Electron", but some competent programmers, especially ones who have experience creating desktop apps, point out that Electron apps are huge resource hogs. It's not about having an opinion, rather stating a fact.