Yes, it’s cheaper, meaning that it allows you to ship more stuff faster. You could make the argument that this results in lower quality, but this isn’t always the case. (For example, VS Code feels great!)
Still, I’d often rather have twice the features at 80% the quality, instead of an extremely high quality product that doesn’t have the features I need.
Cheapness leads to abundance leads to innovation.
I don't know how you came to that conclusion but I'd guess that you mostly work on small projects? (where I'd say smallish is < 100K LOC)
Stuff I'd miss in VS Code coming from JetBrains Rider:
- Docking of panels to top, bottom, left, right
- built-in database explorer (with table designer, script runner, ...)
- built-in unit test explorer
- built-in memory/perf profiler (not talking about a simple text interface!)
- nice config options of project settings (in either text with completion or the UI)
- NuGet package explorer UI
- integrated IL viewer
- great git blame / annotation view
... could continue for a while
Judging from the fact that many people choose VS Code over JetBrains IDEs, despite being aware of JetBrains existence as an option, seems to be prima facie evidence that it is in fact the better choice for those folks.
The things that worked in VS Code's favor:
- free. "All software must be free as in beer" is still a prevailing thought in IT, and people are loathe to pay for anything, even if that anything is extremely useful and very difficult to realise and support. On top of that IDEA still has a reputation of being expensive
- reasonably fast
- plugin system is decent and much easier to get into than IDEA, to keep IDEA as an example
- LSP is an overmarketed hype, but it worked in VSCode's immense favor. While it only covers a tiny sliver of things needed for a fully featured IDE, it covers enough of the important features, and is easy enough to implement. This way even languages that never had anything decent beyond broken syntax highlights in emacs and vim now enjoy at the very least an autocomplete
[1] Code refactoring alone is dozens of pages in IDEA docs https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code....
Now, for electron, it’s certainly not a compliment. From electron apps I’ve used, only VS Code is great, Discord is good, and everything else is just really, really bad. It’s apparently extremely hard to use electron and have something close to decent performance.
To me, "cheaper" means that companies are putting fewer resources into Windows-specific app development. That's not unexpected, given large portions of their user base are using MacOS, Android, or iOS. Why would I hire 8 developers to make 4 apps, when I could hire 6 developers to make make 3 or even 2 apps? Oh, as an added bonus, now my app can also be loaded straight from a browser, no installation necessary? And I don't have nagging complaints from small-market-share users (Linux and BSD) complaining that my app doesn't work on their machines? Seems like a no-brainer.
From a business perspective, if the end product is good enough that the customers don't complain, what reason is there to not* use web technologies?
Don't get me wrong, I hate that half the software I use today is just a glorified Chrome tab. I hate how I need 16GB of RAM to do my job.
I think the best definition of MS products in regard with quality and usability is "cheaper" as in "he is cheap". (i.e. only using the lowest quality crap available)
And if you build an updater in your app like chrome / firefox then it needs to be disabled for Linux distributions that have their own package manager.
I'll grant you that it's probably easier and cheaper to get a workable "color picker in a web app," but I don't grant that going that route will get you a "better app than the native."
The reason why the web stuff is taking over is because it's cheaper while providing minimally-viable functionality, full stop. It's not actually good in any other way.
IMHO, the trend here is similar to the one consumer printers took.