As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web.
So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste.
I think we’re not far away from shipping native compiled to Wasm running on Electron in a Docker container inside a full blown VM with the virtualization software bundled in, all compiled once more to Wasm and running in the browser of your washing machine just to display the time. And honestly when things are cheap, who cares.