I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's.

The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs

But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous place so they further isolate every tab as process, sandbox them and keeps lots or copies of the same thing in RAM because a security flaw is a lot more shameful than a memory flaw.

You are right, electron is a hog. Last I checked all, electron, chromium and Nodejs were open source. We can actually make a difference.

Making noise also makes a difference. When someone complained about VSCode cpu usage because of idle cursor and it blew on HN, next month's release had a fix (for all platform)

The truth is you can't move fast doing native development with different libraries. Electron keeps your dev costs down and allows you to move very fast.