This is bonkers. The UI did look good, I'm suprised it wasn't something native like QT. But I guess when I think about it, does it really matter? Chromium has some of the best engineers behind it, and web developer supply has never been higher.
The question is what you really would gain from using QT compared to Chrome/HTML/JS.
Performance won't really matter for this. It it's good enough on the hardware they have, then further improving it does not make a difference. Provided they are running everything really mission-critical and real-time outside of the UI and on an RTOS or specialized hardware anyway (I really really hope so).
One advantage might be audibility and the hope for less defects due to a smaller codebase and less dependencies. But I think even QT is already far beyond that point. And since Chrome is nowadays wider deployed, it might have a higher level of maturity than eg. the QT/QML tech.
It's simply that right now, web is the best. Far from perfect, but the best.
Could you go into more detail? With Qt, you can use Qt Designer/Creator and get a working UI pretty fast and easily.
* write once, run everywhere.
* the amount of tools and libraries.
* Modern javascript is better than c++ or python for UI
* the availability of good web developers
* The npm ecosystem is a bit overzealous in the dependency department. Not everything is bloated inside npm or out of it but a lot of it is.
* Javascript itself hasn't changed much in the way of making DOM creation/mutation easier. Custom elements, shadow DOM, etc. were nice but at the end of the day you still need to call createElement a lot and do everything manually. You're probably referring to using libraries, of which some are nice but many suffer the above-mentioned bloat problem. Event handling similarly hasn't changed much.
* True enough, there probably haven't been this many of us in a long long time! More people must mean more good people.