It is true that as a GUI toolkit Electron as at least as complicated and quirky as everything that came before. I would argue more, but I'm willing to chalk tha

It is true that as a GUI toolkit Electron as at least as complicated and quirky as everything that came before. I would argue more, but I'm willing to chalk that up to unfamiliarity. The thing about apps, though, is that the frontend isn't the only end, and in web dev your backend is also radically different and likely more complex. Now it's a good thing that there is an architectural boundary between the frontend and backend. God knows not every desktop app is good about that. But the problem in web dev is that it is a complex architectural boundary that has its own footguns. Suddenly you have to do everything concurrently and securely. And on the backend, you can no longer just serialize to a file in a known directory. You have to learn securely connect to a database, be competent in a query language, and be able to manage all the infrastructure or sysadmin work that comes with databases. Oh, and you can no longer just distribute your application as a binary or with an installer. Now you have to be a master of all the sysadmin and process work that comes with deploys and cloud infrastructure. Debugging is no longer just gdb and depends on competent logging, you're likely to have to finagle calls to several REST APIs (all with slightly different auth) instead of just linking in a library, you have a hell of a lot more things to mock when you're testing... The list of added complexity goes on and on and on, and all of this is on top of whatever complexity is inherent in the problem domain to begin with. Web dev adds just adds a ton of complexity.