That's true, but when you roll a "one size fits all" HTML app across all platforms, it's much much less likely to follow operating system conventions and very easy to get layout details wrong.

For example, Hipchat's settings overlay (https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png) which should:

• Be a separate window

• Be sized properly for its contents instead of having to scroll

• Use tabs along the top for the settings categories

• Not have clipped left edges on all of the checkboxes

• Put the close button in the top left corner of the window like the rest of the OS

Compare to settings in Textual, which is an actual native application: https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png

Beyond the design aspects, there's also the issue of performance (the OS's UI layout system is well optimized for doing UI layout) and battery impact.

The average "Energy Impact" of Hipchat as measured by Activity Monitor is 24x as high as Textual's. Twenty four! That puts it in 3rd place, beaten only by Google Chrome and Spotify (which IIRC is a similar "wrapped our webapp in CEF or electron). Hipchat does a bit more than Textual (inline image display), but not enough to justify its abuse of my battery life.

Apps built with front end web tech are nearly always heavier than their fully native counterparts, for one. It's nothing for an electron-based app to gobble up 150MB, 250MB, and higher amounts of memory while doing (in terms of resources actually required for the given task) nothing. A great comparison is Sublime Text, which takes up ~35MB of memory at cold start, even with a few plugins enabled. Compare this to VS Code or Atom, which take around 200MB right out of the box. That's downright comical, and I can't accept the "but resources are cheap" excuse. That mentality has been robbing users of the lightning-fast, ultra-silky experiences that are possible even on decade-old hardware for years now and it needs to stop.

Aside from that, non-native applications inevitably introduce accessibility issues and UX incongruencies with the rest of the system that are difficult if not impossible to resolve entirely. There's a huge trade off made when using web tech for desktop applications and developers would do well to deeply consider their choice of technologies before acting.