I'm not a frontend developer, but absent svelte, the next easiest thing to develop is a full on desktop application (easier than some other frontend web framework)?

I haven't done Svelte but in general I find native is easier than web UI. The tools and libraries just did more for you 20 years ago than any web framework does today. Web frameworks (Svelte included) just keep reinventing the wheel without giving you a second one.

I'm a web developer and I like the power and flexibility it has compared to native GUI development but I think a big problem is we now have an entire generation that doesn't even know what they're missing.

That's interesting. I've done a lot of Qt and GTK development, but it was always a pretty miserable experience. Notably, GTK builds on GObject, which is just a bunch of hacks to emulate object-oriented programming in C to no discernible benefit. Similarly, Qt was (presumably still is?) its own language atop C++, and you needed a special compiler to compile it into vanilla C++. Additionally, because C and C++ build systems are so very terrible (no standard tooling, no dependency management at all, certainly no reproducibility, etc etc), managing projects in these languages was utterly terrible (nowadays I understand that CMake has built-in support for Qt, which speaks to the sadness of the build ecosystem that the build tool has to have first-class knowledge about individual libraries and frameworks). Of course, there were bindings, but bindings never adequately masked the complexity of the frameworks, and with respect to memory management you now had to understand in detail how these frameworks' memory management conventions integrated with the host language's garbage collector or you would see your Python (or whatever) application segfault. And yes, I tried Vala and Gnome's JavaScript offering and everything else available at the time.

I'm guessing that the Windows and MacOS frameworks were less hostile, but it seemed like the web was surely ideal, at least in the last several years. Sure, you had to learn a web framework to build simple applications, but you could at least use a high level language with a reasonably sane package manager (for those who haven't developed in C or C++, it might come as a surprise that JavaScript and NPM are "sane" tools) and a reactive programming model.

I guess I'm not sure if my expectations for web development are too high or if GTK and Qt are especially bad representatives of native development.