See my actual narrative in the original thread (this one is a repost two hours after): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515

Not Electron involved at all. The point of RN is that it is native; no overhead of running headless Chromium. The fact that Microsoft are putting their weight behind it means great things for RN, desktop, and macOS. They say they've finished rewriting most of their core apps with RN; this is the first indication of the codebase they likely used to target macOS. It's come out of nowhere, too: there's a same-named repo with 14k+ stars, for comparison.