It’s not JavaScript-on-desktop that’s the problem- this was a suspicion often cast at Gnome’s bad performance, until Canonical got involved, started fixing performance issues, and it was discovered that most of those issues stemmed from inefficient waits and stuff. The reason why Electron apps gets such a bad rap (and I fully agree, I hate them too) is because they carry basically an entire Chromium with them in addition to whatever you wanted to accomplish. HN is pretty split on Electron afaik because whilst it killed native apps for Windows and Mac, it has brought a lot of them to Linux.