It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option).

But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.

I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?

FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.