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Yes I have, and I have used interfaces which were as rich, or even richer, for decades, without the need of embedding web content.

For instance GTK apps in the earlies 2000s were easily displaying content as rich.

I understand that. But we also have apps like Adium displaying their chat messages using HTML with no issues, just because they want to easily customize the themes.

Point is, native or not native, this should not matter for a well optimized code. We are not talking about a AAA game here, it's just a chat app. It should not be burning cycles when inactive.

I feel like I've made a mistake mentioning IRC - that was just an example to say that a client that receives and sends messages over the network was a solved problem.

Rich interface doesn't mean HTML and CSS. Have you seen good iOS apps? Their interface is just as rich and yet it's pure Swift/Objective-C compiled down to native code.

There are plenty of chat apps with rich interfaces not implemented in HTML. Some of them far better than Slack.

Can you provide some examples?

Messages on OS X?