The culprit is using web technologies where they don't belong, which Electron is also guilty of. Claude Code is 400k lines of JavaScript for a TUI where a sane implementation in C would be two orders of magnitude less code.

Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite

Yup. VSCode is really fast and memory-frugal for an Electron application of that complexity.

Likewise, Gnome has proven that you can write entire UIs in Javascript and have them be quite performant.

Electron (well, Node is a big sub-culprit) and Javascript in general just make it really easy to create a slow, bloated application.

Always has been.