There are too many platforms now. Back in the day people would buy into the windows or mac ecosystem and it was all they had. You could build only a windows des

There are too many platforms now. Back in the day people would buy into the windows or mac ecosystem and it was all they had. You could build only a windows desktop app and sell it and have enough happy customers to make a living. Nowadays people expect your thing to be on their laptop and their tablet and their phone, so in practice you have to be on windows, android and iOS at a minimum, and probably macOS too, and linux for brownie points. And people often have windows and mac devices and expect you to be on both. Oh, and you better sync their data, so you need a server also. So you need at least a server codebase, a mobile codebase (or two), and then a desktop codebase. Having to build at least three codebases instead of one is why you see fewer solo developers making a product and earning a living from it. And then for that desktop codebase, you can either build it twice for windows and mac, or you can just build it as a web app and maybe wrap it in electron for easy platform integration. The other cross-platform approaches don’t seem all that much more productive than web dev, so most people stick to web technologies for serving the desktop.