Agreed. As much as I dislike the bulk of Electron this feels like the worst of both worlds: you get incompatibilities between different browsers and more difficult installation than with a PWA.

underutilized? Like the office suite, spotify, discord, teams, vscode...

Vscode is electron. Discord is react-native.

Discord Desktop is an Electron app with ui based on react, the same ui that you will get on the website. Only the Mobile Apps for Discord are using react-native.

Most of those are Electron, not PWAs. PWAs are very rare

All of this stuff is only lightweight if Electron is the benchmark.

Exactly. Graphical apps are in such a sad state at present. I know the UIs look fancier, they have ML (sorry "AI"™), etc etc etc but so many of them are gluggy, high latency, JS heavy web frames.

Just because you can wrap some web frontend framework around some libraries and take some fancy screenshots of your landing page doesn't make the software good.

PWAs will likely continue to remain underused on desktop until they gain some important missing bits of desktop integration.

For example on macOS, Electron plugs into the global menubar, making it easy for web app devs to give their Mac users native menus instead of falling back to a redundant in-app menubar. Nearly all electron apps on macOS take advantage of this feature, and if they migrated to PWAs they’d lose it.

PWAs also lack fine grained control over window chrome which puts them in an awkward twilight zone between browser window and desktop integrated web app.