https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
It is supposedly still mostly Windows native XAML. Allegedly, even the components that use react are using react native for windows and are therefore not rendering any sort of resource-wasting web view.
I wrote my own react native phone app and it’s only a 30MB download. Your random comparison to a bulky chat app with an extensive feature list (the most popular culprits like Slack and Discord are not written in React Native, by the way) consuming a GB of RAM is irrelevant. Have you measured the start menu consuming 1GB of RAM? Unless you have, your argument is a whataboutism.
If you think it’s bad that Microsoft is using stuff that makes it easy for them to develop windows you should explain to me how it would be better for them to have extreme difficulty in making improvements like how the old control panel basically couldn’t be updated with any reasonable development cadence for decades while macOS ran circles around Windows for their clean settings experience, versus the new settings pane that Microsoft can actually iterate on and improve.
You can criticize the new settings panel for maybe not having 100% of what you want in it but you can’t criticize being a scary nightmare for novice users like the old version.
It is in the users’ benefit if Microsoft can actually hire people who are real humans and not just myths.