This is very sad! PWA is future of agile apps development.
Nothing else.
It has certainly nothing to do with any "agile apps development" and there is little to no market for it outside of mobile (i.e. desktop).
Edit: grammar fix.
Especially a locked down one, full of unblockable ads? (cf Youtube app on mobile which is happy to insert 10 adds in a 10 minute video ...)
Moreover, it is a complete red herring - there is not much advantage in a "much more up to date browser" in an app that will ever open/download a single page (so security or newer standard support is rarely a problem). Never mind that even the Electron apps can be (and are) updated frequently.
Also, PWAs are unable to do many things that Electron apps can as PWA is still ultimately in a browser sandbox whereas Electron runs a Node.js backend that can do pretty much anything a regular desktop app can (networking, access hardware, etc.).
That said, I am certainly not advocating Electron, it is a horrible kludge leading to poorly designed applications that break desktop usability conventions constantly, are enormous resource hogs and require weird workarounds for doing basic stuff only for the sake of being able to do user interface in HTML and javascript.
This is precisely why I would prefer many of the Electron apps that I've used to be PWAs instead. For many apps I don't trust them with access to e.g. my entire filesystem; a PWA would get me the nice UI, notifications, etc of a native app while still keeping them in their sandbox.
Is it? The prospect of a single standard is still pretty enticing to me. Granted, you have things like Cordova, Flutter etc that already solve the single codebase problem. But under the hood they all “convert” things to native XY and Z. Don’t you think that a single standard like PWA would be better for the industry in general?
It will kill a lot of monetization, which is probably why it failed to get much traction with Apple.