Electron + React is pretty good. In that you get tons of components, accessibility, and tooling. The downside however is that it's incredibly expensive compute

Electron + React is pretty good. In that you get tons of components, accessibility, and tooling. The downside however is that it's incredibly expensive compute and memory wise. Many applications are just too complex to represent as HTML + JS + CSS with a virtual dom in a performant manner. So then to make the performance work you have to write more custom code in JS or use more fringe technologies like WASM and at that point you're losing the usability aspect of Electron. I haven't looked at the source code for VS Code, but I'm pretty confident in saying it's not naive/straight-forward HTML + JS.