Later, at a different job, the UI was Electron based, but designers no longer worked in HTML, they used some other tools and it had become the job of engineers to write the HTML and CSS to match.
These trends seem to be driven partly by conventional wisdom about the lowest common denominator among young people in the workforce, e.g. javascript and html are so much easier, let's build everything on those, and next thing you know those have become a given and the next crop of kids will use something new on top of that. Or maybe something like QT will win and native code will become a first class citizen again with secondary support inside browsers via WebAssembly?
That's funny, because it's exactly the type of job I'd love doing --- and I have been working on stuff like that (native code, mostly Win32, with some hardware/drivers/embedded stuff) for a long time; if you haven't guessed already, I try to stay very far away from the web stuff, even though I know HTML/CSS/JS and can use it if needed.
At least with Electron you’re essentially forced to style everything - and ever since Windows 8 (or Windows Vista) Microsoft has been actively uglifying native widgets.
Still Java feels speedy, I think because it is compiled and doesn't need wacked workarounds like not having non-floating point numbers.
Update: ah, Microsoft released their own port in 1997: https://www.cnet.com/news/ie-gets-java-for-windows-3-1/ - I wonder how long they maintained that for.