> The efficiency difference between native and "modern" web stuff is easily several orders of magnitude; you can write very useful applications that are only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions.

Except for the 25 years support, you can get the same features if an electron runtime was introduced and you avoid using too many libraries from npm. In most electron apps, most bloat is caused by the bundled runtime instead of the app itself. See my breakdown from a year ago of an electron based color picker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19652749