I think we too easily conflate Electron and apps based on Electron. If you take the Electron demo app, you won't notice it. It has no impact on your machine whatsoever. Plenty of Electron based apps though have abysmal performance and a negative impact on battery life etc. I've also come across a few that behave like proper citizens. A lot of what makes people frustrated with Electron based apps isn't actually caused by Electron, but what people have layered on top of it.

I think it was with Slack recently that someone noticed they actually ship the dev build of their JS code. Which would explain a thing or two about its performance and resource usage.