Sad for developers.
What I had in mind regarding desktop were big tools like Blender, Photoshop, Blender, IntelliJ IDEs, which existed long before Electron.
I think it clearly shows that complex UI apps require cross platform UI, or will remain single platform (Xcode, Visual Studio).
I was at a crossroads in 2008. I had been developing mostly in C for a decade and decided to pivot to being your standard “Enterprise Dev”. I had a choice between moving my career to C# or Java. I chose C# partly because of the bad stench of the cross platform Java IDEs at the time. Give me VS or Xcode any day over a Java based IDE.
Photoshop definitely isn’t using a non native runtime. I doubt that Blender is either.
VS Code is winning because it's multiplatform and has great support for lots of languages. I'd say it's the best choice for 95% of programmers.
But for writing C# apps in a Windows computer, the old VS was already miles ahead back in 2010. It is a really good product. It had RAD tools, testing, deployment, source control, database migrations, all wrapped in a very snappy and convenient GUI that I still don't think VS Code replaces properly. As much as I love the command line and unix philosophy, there was something about such a complete IDE that made me very productive. All IMO of course.
However I strongly believe that VS Code will get better and better with time and be able to fully replace old VS even for this use case in the future.
VS is all good until it slows to a crawl on big projects. Anecdotal evidence I know, but I've seen people on hn switch to code for c# and like it. Also, nowadays at least testing and source control are pretty good in vscode.
I think it clearly shows that complex UI apps require cross platform UI, or will remain single platform (Xcode, Visual Studio).