uTorrent is perhaps another bad choice.
uTorrents first public beta release was in late 05 Qbittorrent was released in early 06.
By the time about anyone was aware of uTorrent Qbittorrent was already a thing and as good. uTorrent went on to become first proprietary and ultimately ended up installing malware on users system and mining coin whereas Qbittorrent is still awesome.
Slack with its famously crappy performance and battery destruction is probably another bad choice to make the case although I hear its improved lately. Maybe wait another year to use it as an example so people have time to forget how much it sucked.
I would totally stay with comparing say visual studio code to visual studio and hope your audience doesn't remember Emacs and Jetbrains products are also cross platform without electron.
I think instead you should hope they do remember those.
I wouldn't say that emacs is a shining exemple of desktop UI. Everything is based on text buffers and keyboard commands. I don't see this type of application getting the same scale of adoption as vscode or slack (and this comes someone who has used emacs as an editor for python and org mode files for 3 years).