Granted, I'm biased (being a frontend dev), but I think there are many apps and dashboards in popular usage that aren't a great fit for the document model, like Figma, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps/OSM, Discourse, Netflix, YouTube, games, Slack/Discord, Spotify, VSCode... to go on and on.
I don't think the web is necessarily the best consumer desktop platform, but it's what we ended up with after Java, .NET, etc. failed. But I guess the flipside of it is that a lot of apps that formerly would've required a native executable can now just be a JS app that contorts the DOM (or draws to Canvas). That's cool, since it eases distribution a lot, way better than Java web start or Microsoft's ClickOnce could.
> That's cool, since it eases distribution a lot, way better than Java web start or Microsoft's ClickOnce could.
One argument against Electron Apps is the existence of software like GIMP, Calibre, Blender, VLC,... which manage to be multi-platform without being built by a multi-million dollars company. And on Linux, it's very easy to get them with the package manager. Web Technologies may be a faster way to build a prototype, but it does not tend to efficient software. And I prefer not to have a hard dependency on someone's servers for my workflows [1].
[1]: I still use internet based services, but I prefer to have my data offline (music, photos, documents, books,...).
I don't think the web is necessarily the best consumer desktop platform, but it's what we ended up with after Java, .NET, etc. failed. But I guess the flipside of it is that a lot of apps that formerly would've required a native executable can now just be a JS app that contorts the DOM (or draws to Canvas). That's cool, since it eases distribution a lot, way better than Java web start or Microsoft's ClickOnce could.