> I kind of wonder why it took this long for someone to try this approach. It just makes a whole lot more sense on the surface.

Like other replies have mentioned, it's not a new idea

DeskGap uses the native OS Webviews. https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/

Electrino (4 years old) was an experiment where they forked Electron and removed Chromium to replace it with the native OS Web views. https://github.com/pojala/electrino

Quark is a fork of Electrino: https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

There's also a way of building desktop GUIs using Deno, which uses Deno Webview, which is a binding for the same webview library that Tauri uses.

https://denotutorials.net/making-desktop-gui-applications-us... https://github.com/webview/webview