I think it's due to a majority of those who have been around the block a few times knowing a trainwreck of a fad when they see one. At the end of the day it's basically taking a web page and throwing it into a container without browser controls. Remember when Windows 95 IE4 enhancements got so much flak and jeers from hackers due to MSHTML? Electron feels even worse than that.

The Web still sucks, and we don't need to shove The Web into native applications. Learn to make an actual program. Heck, QT exists, learn to use it.

I'm not saying you can't use an HTML layout engine for help and info screens, but for the entire program it's pants-on-head stupid. The time spent trying to warp one's web designer skills to make an "app" could have been used to learn how to make an actual application that would've been portable, and take less than a gig of RAM.

I use Teams at work, and it's taking 300+ MB of RAM on startup when it's basically a glorified chat client. Insanity.

> we don't need to shove The Web into native applications

90% of the time I'd agree with this sentiment, but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content. A browser engine integration is just the reality, at some level.

>but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content

No they don't.

I don't think I have any HTML emails that require more than web 2.0 stylings, which isn't really much more than lynx would support, plus images.

Its not clear to me you need anything resembling a modern web browser to render HTML emails. Do they even commonly use HTML5 features?

Then your term "modern" is wrongly used here. I haven't seen any substantial change in the last 10-15 years in regards to HTML mails.