Yes it is. Whenever you open a common app whose interface is janky, uses a ton of memory, doesn't load all views as instantly as you expect a desktop app to and needs to frequently refresh itself you know you're using electron. Think slack and spotify, the article doesn't mention it but I'm sure Tidal is too because it behaves in exactly the same way.

I don’t understand how billion dollar companies can’t pony up for a few native app devs lol

The absurd is that lone developers (or small teams) manage to out do in quality apps from large companies. Nowadays, most software by a large company is terrible, even if native. Take a look at Apple's software going downhill, Microsoft software going downhill, etc.

Because it’s much faster and easier to deploy new features when you have one app for three platforms. They’d be crazy to spend resources on native apps for those.

The only program that seems to be doing rather well seems to be Visual Code. It's fast and responsive, and one of the main advantages of it using Electron is that it got a fully cross-platform plugin system almost for free. Given the importance of that application in my daily work, I don't mind it using a few hundred MB ram. I have other critical tools running that consume way more than that.

But that's about the only electron app I really like to use that I use on a daily basis. Many of the other things like slack, discord, spotify, ... are more of a nuisance, and are more 'background' applications for me. Justifying blowing a Gb or 2 of ram on these is hard. I currently already use Franz (also electron) to replace all the "chat" applications, which is tolerable given that it replaces a few things, but still not a huge fan.

VSCode is bad too. Compare it to Notepad++ or BB Edit, it's no competition. VSCode looks out of place on any platform it runs on, is slow when compared to native editors, takes up a lot of RAM, practically useless when opening large log files, etc. People keep bringing that as a shining example, but it's bad on its own right. It's just less bad than the other Electron "software".

It's snappy compared to IDEs like Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA, slow compared to native editors like Sublime Text. I think it's unbeatable as a TypeScript IDE and that's what I use it for most of the time. When I need to open a large file, I use Sublime Text.

> Is electron currently still the bloated beast it was a few years ago?

yes

Yes.

Yes.