> Think of all the software which does not exist if we are still writing in assembly because we are constrained by the hardware.
There is an entire spectrum between "640k ought to be enough for anybody" and "this app needs its own fully independent copy of an entire browser engine just to display a couple screens of text".
About Electron: Operating systems provide their own system-level webviews. Use those. Tauri uses those; Tauri apps are absolutely tiny and use very little RAM, because the system-level webview doesn't have to duplicate the overhead of an entire browser engine for every single app that uses it. It typically only has to duplicate the overhead of a single page.
But that is for apps that even need a webview. For apps that don't, you don't have to drop all the way down to assembly to pick something like WinForms. Even WinUI 3 isn't always terrible, at least compared to webviews.
Hell, I wonder if even Python + wxPython would be more efficient than using a webview. Honestly, none of the software you mentioned is "too wasteful", or at least those aren't what I was referring to with my original comment.
Have you heard about Microsoft Teams, and how it can take up to 10 seconds just to display the splash screen, even on a decently fast computer? I'd like to see you try to tell me that it would have literally killed them to optimize it a bit more. Just think back to, say, the IRC clients from back in the Windows 7 days where you wouldn't even have to blink before they finished opening up.