Yeah, it's worth pointing out that people are blaming electron for what's wrong with Slack. When, perhaps, it's just Slack itself that sucks?
I use Discord all the time, which is one hell of an oranges-to-oranges comparison (with Slack), and not only does it have none of the perf problems of Slack, it's also faster and snappier than any NATIVE chat app I've used.
There's a lot that can be done wrong in any framework; as recently as windows xp, there were a few atrocious algorithmic-complexity gaffes in basic file viewing (directories with more than a few hundred files would slow to a crawl in the GUI, taking multiple minutes to display). It wasn't the fault of the framework it was written in; it's just that someone at MS had written something that had to scan the directory in a hurry, and ended up accidentally writing an exponential-time algorithm. Slack likely has a few deep-seated goofs in their architecture that are just too big to extract and fix.