I think it's not "despite" but "due to". If all you have is a locked-down user-herding media consumption "device"[1], the web stuff is pretty much the easiest way to have access to something like a Turing-complete language.
[1] the fact that a word which used to primarily refer to computer peripherals is now increasingly applied to a general-purpose computer itself is a telling sign of where things are going next. Destroying the general-purpose nature of computing little-by-little and selling you back small specific pieces of it seems to be the trend today.
That's handled by Electron already. Unfortunately in a very inefficient way, but I don't think web-based UIs on the desktop will disappear soon. The comfort of using the same tech as websites and compatibility with many systems is hard to beat. I just hope all those projects aiming to replace Electron with their smaller footprint hold what they promise.
When it comes to TCO and time to market, none of the non-Web solutions come close to Electron.
I thought SIMD Everywhere was a pretty interesting project for that, lets you write x86 SSE/AVX code and run it on non-x86 architectures:
Those are exactly the areas hindered by vendor lock-in.
Everyone wants to reuse their web app on the desktop, but soon it could flip the other way around if you can suddenly run your native app in a browser
I'm sorry, but WASM won't magically be able to port your UI app to the web. Just because it can convert some basic logic doesn't mean that it will be able to create a performant application that uses the underlying browser APIs correctly.
Lets say there was some sort of framework that did this in your language of choice, there's still significant downsides in terms of interop with the rest of the JS ecosystem and debugging.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...