The development experience indeed uses the world's most popular JS tools (otherwise no one would use it), npm and node. But it looks like the server implementat

The development experience indeed uses the world's most popular JS tools (otherwise no one would use it), npm and node. But it looks like the server implementation is all c++ leveraging the existing we view framework to do it's thing. So the user footprint is indeed node-free. Your line of inquiry feels semi hostile to me & I'd like a lot to see a little more naunce & moderation & tentativeness rather than all guns blazing. Most of your post seems to be about developer experience, of whether developers need node or what the build time is. Personally I think the choices here are incredibly smart & sensible, make perfect sense, and do a great job to do the most important thing, which is give the developers enormous leverage to build a maximally lightweight & fast desktop webapp.