…which requires an Electron app to constantly be running for it to really work. Not great.
The Electron app needs to run to set options or to force filters update, not the rest of the time. It's still an annoyance but it's better than nothing.
as a windows user i was puzzled by this when installing adguard
My guess is that it's engineered like this to simplify their code base(s) between their various free plugins and their paid "Adguard for Mac" and "Adguard for Windows" apps.