Take a look at desktop Telegram when you have some time. It bundles its own fork of Qt (which inflates its shared memory usage as nobody else is using the library), has a very polished UI and all the same features as any other modern messenger, and runs circles around any Electron application I've ever seen. On my machine from 2014 it starts instantly and the memory usage never goes above 200-250 MBs, which is not ideal, but still is ~4 times less than the _startup_ memory usage of an Electron application.