> Javascript is just a basically-ordinary scripting language, and isn’t inordinately terrible (or even Perl-levels of terrible). It’s not great, but it’s OK, and that’s good enough for lots of people.

I'll take issue with that. JavaScript is a broken language, but where it falls on the broken-languages continuum isn't the problem: the fact that JavaScript exists is the problem. Web pages shouldn't be executable code; they should be documents. The world should have a universally-understood programming language, of course, but that language isn't JavaScript (IMHO it's Lisp, but perhaps some folks would make an argument for Scheme, others for Smalltalk & others for ML).

> The problem with Electron is that browsers are terrible at literally everything.

Completely agree here. With apologies to Gene Spafford, a web browser is like is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

> It’s easier to write a simple GUI app with GTK when you don’t know GTK than it is to write the same thing as a web app when you’re already a pro at writing web apps.

I suspect that's true. Getting a few tiny things working in the web stack is easy — getting a full app running properly is … obtuse.