It's cemented the perception of web desktop tech in many people's mind & I question whether it's possible to de-infect what has become a quite strongly held dogmatism. There's few apps broadly actually uses these days, so the opportunity is also troublingly slim. I want to ask, what are the contestible assertions, what would change your mind? But even for me it's hard to imagine finding sufficient leverage, having enough examples, to really challenge the negative perceptions.
For what it's worth, discord load time is a bit obnoxious but I've found it to be pretty performant once loaded, and I'm a fairly intense user who is on many dozens of servers.
Most people just try to see what the various tradeoffs are between alternatives. For desktop apps, we’re talking about Electron versus, say, Qt, Cocoa, WPF, or whatever.
The observation that web packaged apps are typically slower and typically have worse UIs is probably not being contested here. Likewise, the advantages of Electron for cutting costs and shipping apps faster is probably not being contested.
I think the only real question people have is, “Do you care?”
I used the desktop version of Discord for a few years. It seems like—well, a real piece of shit, to be honest. So I use the web client now. Performance is only really a problem when you scroll around, deep in the history of a channel. My point of reference is apps like Adium.