I am not understanding what all the hype is about "Electron". What does it bring to the table that I can't code myself? So many apps are based upon Electron.
The ability to create reasonably good-looking cross-platform desktop applications using Node.js. Obviously Electron is not much use to you if you're already experienced in the native development kit of your platform, but if your main expertise is Node.js (which is the case for an increasing number of developers), Electron is quite handy.
Now I have the opportunity to do what I actually wanted to do.
As you said, Electron clearly has its advantages. But I appreciate the effort when a developer creates an application using the target platform's native language, frameworks and usage patterns (in this case, Swift, AppKit and the Cocoa APIs). The result is, in my opinion, clearly worth the effort and a wonderful piece of software to use.
Web development has ballooned into a capable, flexible and highly complex beast. It is evolving (understatement) but it can be used to produce very complex apps now, witness the Google productivity apps.
All that said, true native apps provide a superior user experience if done well.
That sort of gets to how I feel about Electron apps. If you don't like Electron apps, then just pretend any app made with it isn't available for your platform, as would likely be the case if they were not using a cross-platform library.
There is always the Qt5 option, although I'd be curious to see how much overhead (latency, battery consumption, etc) Qt brings over a program built directly in Cocoa.
I've never used it, but it sounds potentially great for people who do a lot of web development. It's a frictionless way for them to share code and other assets between native(isher) desktop apps and web projects. For web developers who don't do desktop development at all, it's also a relatively frictionless way to ship a desktop app.
If you don't need a cross-platform UI toolkit, and/or don't need to (or want to) use web technologies in a desktop app, it wouldn't be a net positive. Obviously there are downsides in terms of performance and not having a native UI. The upsides depend on your requirements, which range from 0 to >= the downsides.