You're absolutely right. I tried building Upscayl with Tauri initially, but after a few days I had to give up because I was trading my time for bundle size. Then I tried Neutralino only to discover that it does not support node runtime. With Electron, we were able to focus on the core features and ship Upscayl very fast.
Since electron is also the only framework that supports node modules, it was pretty much the best low-resistance path for us at the moment.
I do wanna learn Rust eventually but that is an adventure for another day :)
If Rust is too much of an adventure, maybe you'll find Go easier. Wails [1] is great if perhaps a bit more rough round the edges. Because it's go, package sizes are 10mb+ but nothing like Electron 30mb+