I strongly suspect I'd never be able to bring the level of polish I could with HTML & CSS to the UI through the standard SDKs -- so the resulting app would be a much worse user experience as well.
The amount of time I'd have to spend learning a new SDK would basically put me off, and I'd likely never have created this app.
Instead I have over 700 people who have purchased my app (~2 purchases per day over the past half year) - https://videohubapp.com/
But UI is not essential for a functioning app, and if the time costs of building a good UI are too high (a lot of new learning and problem solving) I'll spend less time on it.
What "sample" are you talking about? Is this the kind of thing you're comparing my app to? https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/examples-graphicsview.html
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtdoc-demos-photoviewer-example.html
(Edit: by no means I'm saying that your work is trivial to replicate, apologies if this comment came across like that - just wanted to point out that there's more to Qt than Qt Widget.)
The original reply I made was to point out that startup costs decrease number of people starting. Unless you know Qt already, your first project will take much longer than using technologies you already know. It's not at all clear how long learning would take.
I know I can climb the mountain, but I'd rather not. This isn't to discourage others from doing it, it's to explain to those who don't understand why many people prefer to stick to Electron.
Simple QML viedo player.
However, if you want to hire Qt developers, that's a much smaller pool and then you also need to pay Qt license fees for each one.
If you want to develop truly native applications, now you need to maintain builds for Windows, Mac OS and perhaps even Linux. You need developers familiar with all of these native frameworks.
Optimizing for developers isn't necessarily worse for users, if they can get more done in less time, users benefit. It's just not so obvious. No user will ever complain about a product they aren't using because it won't ship until next year with half the features.
Basically, you need to link dynamically or provide object files. You can't use commercial modules too. But that's only a small portion of Qt anyway.
That should tell you something.
It might change a bit with Flutter & SwiftUI but I still find web & CSS to be a better authoring model.
Note that I've been doing (native) desktop programming before so I can compare.