The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest:
The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Hiring experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive, hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap - shittier performance is the tradeoff to instantly have access to every platform. It's not a coincidence that Electron apps like e.g. Slack, Spotify, Discord are massively dominant players in their markets, I doubt you'd look the engineering leads of these companies in the face and tell them that you believe they put no thought into the tradeoffs of Electron and that they're just following trends.
I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on.
But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases is that these Electron apps can often just be websites.
Usually they are websites. That's kinda the whole point... Spotify's desktop app is the same as open.spotify.com, Discord's is the same as discord.com, VS Code's is the same as vscode.dev, Slack is the same as.. something. But yeah, instead of those companies all needing 5 separate engineering teams (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and you're joking if you think they'll make a Linux native app), they just make a website. You're welcome to use the websites instead of the desktop apps for any of those, though you'll lose some OS integration capability.
I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access.
Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app
I guess that's also kinda Docker or QEMU or V8, but also https://github.com/solo-io/unik if you think about it differently.
In other words: hey, Lisp Machines were an excellent idea back then, but they still are. Maybe someday we'll have a V8 co-processor. More fun reading: https://lobste.rs/s/2poahh/what_i_could_not_undiscover_about