My last comment on HN was four months ago, and incidentally also about Electron. No, nobody has a gun to my head, but a sadly increasing number of applications are Electron based, some of which I'm "forced" to use.
Yes, I hate Electron with a passion. It's a slow, wasteful framework for lazy developers who can't be bothered learning Qt or something else non-silly. IMHO.
The comparison is silly: in 4mb-era one didn’t have to run docker instances and assorted VMs and databases (yes, you can do it in the cloud, but that’s not cheap). Most dev stacks were CPU-bound, now they are mostly memory-bound. That’s why devs are memory-hungry, not because they want 3d emojis.
I’ve had no problem running 10+ containers while running Slack, Chrome, and a few other Electron based apps simultaneously and have never really had problems except for the heat it generates.
If a dev is working on a less capable machine I guess I can see why this is a problem, but a rather simple one to solve, close Slack, it’s a distraction to focused work anyways :)
Back when I had four megabytes of ram I wouldn’t have been furious over a 50kb editor. 200mb isn’t a lot when most developers are working on systems with 16gb or more of memeory.