"Why then are gui systems like electron so popular"
Electron is popular because Chromium is an extremely well funded project that has a bullet-proof business model (more web apps = more crawlable html = more searches = more ad clicks). There are probably more than 1000 people working on it, many of whom are very senior and expensive engineers.
Does Electron make sense in the abstract, i.e. with unlimited resources and no business constraints, would we have ended up with apps shipping a full copy of a web browser with themselves for their UI rendering? Probably not, no. But does it make sense in the concrete, in a world where Google is willing to spend billions every year on a monolithic codebase that does things like optimizing text rendering, abstracting native APIs and so on, then give it away for free? Sure!
So you ask, if it's so bad why hasn't something else replaced it. Money is a big part of it. Yes, writing cross platform frameworks is hard, but it's not that hard. What matters is who is willing to fund it. Google has money, gives away lots of free beer, and that beer comes in the form of an HTML engine.
Electron is popular because Chromium is an extremely well funded project that has a bullet-proof business model (more web apps = more crawlable html = more searches = more ad clicks). There are probably more than 1000 people working on it, many of whom are very senior and expensive engineers.
Does Electron make sense in the abstract, i.e. with unlimited resources and no business constraints, would we have ended up with apps shipping a full copy of a web browser with themselves for their UI rendering? Probably not, no. But does it make sense in the concrete, in a world where Google is willing to spend billions every year on a monolithic codebase that does things like optimizing text rendering, abstracting native APIs and so on, then give it away for free? Sure!
So you ask, if it's so bad why hasn't something else replaced it. Money is a big part of it. Yes, writing cross platform frameworks is hard, but it's not that hard. What matters is who is willing to fund it. Google has money, gives away lots of free beer, and that beer comes in the form of an HTML engine.