To be specific, it is Javascript based desktop application platform. Each finished app ships its own version of Chrome which affects the size and arguably adds quite a lot of overhead. It also makes developing cross-platform desktop applications much more accessible, thus making it easier for more developers to make slow, unoptimized applications. Overall it has become a meme for bulky, slow desktop apps with Visual Studio Code being the notable exception.

It’s a (not well executed) joke about electron’s memory consumption and how developers refuse to use anything better.

> not well executed

Aw! :(

For the record I like Electron a lot and am usually the one to defend it on HN, but it indeed was a comment on binary size, needless duplication and copy-paste culture ;)

I think the joke may be about binary size and not memory, which would make sense when talking about DNA.