Perhaps the cancer is the fact the desktop development community has had decades to settle on a decent cross-platform 'native' toolkit and completely failed.
Perhaps the cancer is 'native' developers spouting 'native is better' hyperbole, ignorant of the fact these supposedly better 'native' toolkits have been web-influenced for a long time.
- XAML from C#/WPF land being strongly influenced by HTML and CSS.
- Android XML being strongly influenced by HTML and CSS.
- Qt Quick being strongly influenced by JS and CSS.
- GTK+ embracing JS and CSS3.
- Everything else being awful procedural C++. Good luck maintaining that.
And all have massively inferior developer tools than Chrome devtools and/or far worse abstractions for the scene-graph/tree of elements than the much-derided yet very powerful DOM.
Native desktop is a mess. I'm glad we're seeing Electron expose it for the joke that it is.
You can hate web dev tech, but you can't claim that native desktop options are better. I won't be building apps 3 times or using any of these useless 'cross-platform' dev kits anytime soon, when I can build the same thing in Electron in a fraction of the time, and leverage the undeniably huge JS and CSS communities.
Also very tired of seeing devs use weasel-words like 'bloat' and neglect to put it into any context, like the fact that on the desktop 1. it ain't bloat if filesize is cheap, and 2. said filesize is comparable to the most capable cross-plat options you're supposedly arguing for (see Qt Quick).
Edit: Softened, expanded.