All the options you listed require two or more programming languages. Electron apps can be written entirely in JavaScript, requiring zero context switching between multiple programming languages, as well as sharing code on the backend and frontend. Hence the popularity.
Then we are back to HTML 5 APIs, which any browser can already do.
If they need to interact with the host OS, someone needs to write those native plugins, and that won't be in JavaScript, as the Github repository for Electron clearly proves.
In the end is all about using an hammer for everything.
No, that isn't the case. The Node.js APIs bundled with Electron expose considerably more functionality to JavaScript than the HTML5 APIs that Chromium exposes. And the Electron framework exposes even more native OS APIs that Chromium and Node.js don't provide.
Look, you can call it "using a hammer for everything" pejoratively if you want, but it's popular for a reason, and that reason isn't the moral decay of society. It offers real utility that reasonable people find valuable for rational reasons.
So because open(2) is implemented in C in the standard library, I should only call it via C, and never invoke the wrapper function open() in python or whatnot?
“Hybrid” does not mean what you think it does. The platform may be built on code in many languages, but to program for that platform, you only have to know one.
> All the options you listed require two or more programming languages.
You can write Qt apps entirely in C++ or entirely in QML (of course you can mix and match both... in my experience whatever the environment you always need to resort to native modules at some point anyways, eg numpy, opencv, etc and Qt makes exposing them to Javascript dead easy).
