Earth's resources are not infinite, nor its ability to tolerate pollution.
Less importantly, my computer's resources are also not infinite. Yes, maybe your Electron app does something I want, but guess what, there are numerous other things I also want to do, and it is a bit silly that an IRC replacement now takes half of my computing power and manages to be less responsive than the stuff I used 20 years ago, in the computers of 20 years ago.
Well, not really. I hate on Electron not because of its size on disk, but its runtime memory footprint. Things like Skype in the background using 500MB, an Autodesk update notifier sitting silently in the tray using 350MB etc. all add up to a few GB of main memory you suddenly don't have. And these numbers are real, by the way.
It's kinda weird how little you have to do with 32 GB (!) of RAM until Windows starts to complain about not having enough free memory and you-better-close-some-applications-right-now! I remember when a 1 GB memory upgrade was something, and back then I could even play a game on 512 MB of memory and occassionally alt-tab to a web browser for cheats... nowadays a web browser on 512 MB RAM is virtually impossible.
(Edit: I realize this complaint is quite old, but from the age where hundreds-of-MB main memory were mainstream we have seen very little actual improvement in GUI fancyness, yet a massive explosion in CPU and memory use, and often even heavily deteriorated responsiveness. That doesn't hold going from the "couple of megs" to "hundreds of megs" age.)
> nowadays a web browser on 512 MB RAM is virtually impossible.
Right now my Palemoon browser uses less than 240Mb. It is possible, just don't do stupid things (like keeping 4385972Z38947 tabs open instead of using bookmarks) or cut out a little the eye-candy and the the "geek status symbol" stuff.
That's kinda the fault of the developer. Electron itself isn't very large and I've seen very well crafted electron apps. The fact that slack uses 1-2gb memory is definitely on slack.
No, lazy bloatware like Electron isn't necessary to create useful software that actually does something users want. These two are independent of each other, you can create useful software that actually does something users want and still have it be lightweight on resources and fast.
