Wow, lots of unbalanced Electron hate in this thread. Sure it's ugly, but it's also an extremely productive and empowering platfotm, that's why it's so popular.

Building a web app and a cross platform desktop app is a common business requirement nowadays. Electron is the fastest way to achieve that with a small team or if going solo.

In many cases your only other feasible alternative would be to use Chromium Embedded Framework or system web views. Those two let you reuse your web app UI but are progressively more work than Electron. Those options don't require packaging a node server though.

PS. I don't think Slack is slow because of Electron. Other Electron apps like VS Code are fast.