One downside: Getting node-electron to run takes some wading through shared library installs to satisfy Chrome dependencies. However, this turns out to be a series of straightforward responses to error messages. Another downside: I'm wasting some memory and swap on Chrome dependencies I'm not using. In the case of my game, I'm always going to be more CPU/bandwidth bound than memory bound, so this turns out to be a non-issue. A third downside: WebRTC uses up 72 bytes of each packet with its own header information.
All that said, it appears to be running like a champ. It also makes a big difference in the play-ability of my game in poor network conditions.