Linux package management is a rare example of successfully tamed complexity. It's magic: having a single copy of, say, gzip implementation imported and used by hundreds of installed applications.
Sandboxed approach works on servers, where a single machine is usually dedicated to running just a handful of rapidly re-installed apps, it has no place on a desktop. I am not interested of every little component (of which I use dozens) landing with its own "runtime".
this madness is caused by the common techno-disease of seeing a nail everywhere when holding a hammer. yes, containers are great for the (trivial) server use case and no, it's stupid on a desktop which is two orders of magnitude more complicated.
I clicked on your link and saw exactly what I expected:
> VisiFile is a NodeJS application built with Express, Sqlite, and various NodeJS modules.
yep. another example of wheels coming off: no, NodeJS is not an appropriate tool to build desktop software. by picking the wrong tool you're dragging the wrong deployment model along with it. I will only use an electron-like app if someone pays me for it (Slack at work).