If this was for a product, the first thing I would have done, was drop half the tools in the stack for their inefficiency! For example, the GUI shell is using Node Webkit (which I prefer to Electron, but is essentially the same thing). That in itself is quite bad, but it's not the worst approach to building a desktop app, as Microsoft and Slack have already proven.

But the .exe's you mentioned are also quite large.

The code is very transparent though. I doubt you'd have been the only one to note how clunky this all is!