All web applications may be spyware, but using web technologies as a common format for specifying a UI had benefit, even if it's not through something as heavy as electron.
Having an interface I can just stand up on a port and access locally through multiple different browser options, or even expose to remote if the user wants, and it will be the same across every OS for zero additional shipped library cost, and works in every programming language, is an amazing thing.
The only one of those even remotely similar to what I'm talking about is X Window System protocol, and that's never been close to ubiquitous, which is something you can say about web browsers. HTTP+HTML is so ubiquitous that many (all of the most popular) operating systems ship built in components to handle it, and then people often have one or two additional clients to handle it.
For RDP, clients are easy to come by (but not ubiquitous), but the server side tech is limited, and generally OS based and not application provided.
For VNC, client and server tech is easily available as a library to all, but it's still an additional layer on top of your application which you need to layer on and then communicate as a separate step to any client that needs remote access.
I'm not familiar with views, but I'm not sure how it could be any easier to use than VNC without limiting where it can be easily deployed.
Opening a port and taking a few commands is simple. There are myriad libraries to help handling requests, and in some languages rolling your own is a matter of tens of lines. The client requires nothing that every person that would want to use it doesn't already have, and if you want to support remote access, you literally just change the interface you bind to from localhost to 0.0.0.0 or the actual IP address. All additional firewall config is something you would likely have to deal with in every other technology as well.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is the best UI paradigm to target. There are many things better about specific UI libs, but none of them can even come close to the cross platform capability and simplicity of just using HTTP+HTML. Do I want major applications delivered this way? No. Do I think it should be the ultimate choice for most programs that have time and resources to do otherwise? Probably not. Do I appreciate that I can write a Perl/Python/Rudy/JavaScript script and package it with its runtime or ship as a script (or just use a compiled language) and it will just work on basically any platform I'd want to run it on, and a client (browser) exists for everything someone would want to use to configure it? Hell yes.
Having an interface I can just stand up on a port and access locally through multiple different browser options, or even expose to remote if the user wants, and it will be the same across every OS for zero additional shipped library cost, and works in every programming language, is an amazing thing.