Electron is Chrome and Chrome itself is pretty tightly optimised for what it does. The issue isn't actually Electron so much as using a platform designed for typesetting for making complex GUI apps, a task for which it was never designed and isn't particularly good at.
But. That said. Whilst I'm no big fan of web apps, there are good reasons they're so prevalent. It's not merely about developer convenience. Native GUI toolkits can appear artificially performant because they're required by the OS and thus almost always resident, vs cross platform toolkits that may be used by only one app at a time. When you open the lid though the gap between an engine like Blink and something like Qt, JavaFX or Cocoa isn't that big. They're mostly doing similar things in similar ways. The big cost on the web is the DOM+CSS but CSS has proven popular with devs, so native toolkits increasingly implement it or something like it.
