Sure, but there's a difference between web-based and built using web technologies. Whatever other faults electron apps have, they're fairly consistent across operating systems. For a tool (like a chat client) that's very appealing. It's all that other things that seem to be endemic to electron apps (high resource usage, large size) that are the problem. Theoretically if you make a webapp that works fine on Safari Edge and Chrome you could use the OS provided webviews on iOS, MacOS, Android and Windows (and Electron on other platforms I guess) to ship local equivalents that are less problematic at the expense of more engineering work (or maybe just a leaner meaner electron competitor).