I don't underestimate the sheer amount of cognitive effort, money and time needed to maintain native versions of software. Or to build a desktop application at

I don't underestimate the sheer amount of cognitive effort, money and time needed to maintain native versions of software. Or to build a desktop application at all! From my perspective Thunderbird, IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome are extremely complicated pieces of software. My initial exposure to Qt is that it is a very difficult framework to use properly to build nontrivial applications. Not only do you have the barebones complexity of C (build everything yourself) or the overwhelming complexity of C++ (there's many ways of doing the same thing) you also have a graphical GUI framework AND a platform API to work with. It's simply a lot of moving parts. I've written a few Java SWING GUIs and an electron app but I wouldn't want to use a low level programming language to build a GUI.