I’m still not convinced that it’s relevant to the discussion — it’s an old-school GUI builder, Electron isn’t, and it’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison

I’m still not convinced that it’s relevant to the discussion — it’s an old-school GUI builder, Electron isn’t, and it’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. People gravitate to Electron not just because you can’t build cross-platform apps in it, but because the underlying UI tech is just the web. You can even do as Slack did, which is to offer the exact same app in the browser. You can’t do that with FPC/Lazarus. The latter is geared towards fairly static layouts, not the kinds of snappy, fluid, single-window apps that Electron is used to build. It’s just a very different world. Nobody is doubting that you can build decent Windows-style apps with FPC/Lazarus, just as they’re not doubting that you can do it with Qt.