> But building for the web(and electron) forces you to HTML/Javascript(and derivates).
This is incorrect. Electron supports Objective-C, C++, Rust, and obviously WASM (amongst others). If you want to build native code (and native UI) in any of these languages, go for it. Countless Electron apps have native components.
> It has no type safety, memory leaks are common and it’s slow due to its dynamic nature.
TypeScript has been a thing for a while now. [Citation needed] for the statement that memory leaks are more common than in, say, C++. Slow: Yes, it's slower, but probably by _a lot_ less than you think[1].
> And it’s laughable how weak the browser platform itself is. SQLite is available on raspberry pi, embeddable systems, mobile platforms and just about every other platform on the planet.
I agree, SQLite is fantastic. We don't really have to argue whether IndexDB will get thee job done, because native bindings to use SQLite with Electron exist. Just... use it.
And lastly...
> These days to send a text message over Slack I need over 1GB of RAM. [...] Even basic apps with all of their trackers, external javascript scripts and doms take up 100s of MBs in memory.
We're always working on performance and we're quite far from the place I'd like us to be at, but it'll send your message just fine if you have less than one GB of memory installed in your whole machine. Even if you're a heavy user, your memory _should_ be below one GB. To be clear, I'll say it again: Yes, things should be better and we'll keep working on performance. The post mentioned Instagram earlier, which I'd say goes a bit beyond the most basic app, and it's using a humble 40MB on my machine.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers of Electron and an engineer at Slack. I'm not here to argue opinions or which tool is better for which job, but we should get the basic facts right.