I will come at this from a different, philosophical perspective:
Web apps come from a tradition of engaging the user. This means (first order) to keep people using the app, often with user-hostile strategies: distraction, introducing friction, etc.
Native desktop apps come from a tradition of empowering the user. This means enabling the user to accomplish something faster, or with much higher quality. If your app distracts you or slows you down, it sucks. "Bicycle for the mind:" the bicycle is a pure tool of the rider.
The big idea of desktop apps - heck, of user operating systems at all - is that users can bring their knowledge from one app to another. But web apps don't participate in this ecosystem: they erode it. I try a basic task (say, Undo), and it doesn't work, because web apps are bad at Undo, and so I am less likely to try Undo again in any app.
A missing piece is a force establishing and evolving UI conventions. It is absurd that my desktop feels mostly like it did in 1984. Apple is trying new stuff, but focusing on iPad (e.g. cursors); we'll have to see if they're right about it.
You may not be aware of this, but the person you replied to has worked for years on a native UI toolkit. And they provide justification, too: skills don’t transfer between websites as readily as they do between apps. And while I wouldn’t associate we applications are somehow morally inferior, the fact is that many of today’s issues with increasing friction to drive engagement originated on the web and are easy to perpetuate on the web.
Worst thing that ever happened to HN was self-awareness, now your comment is worse than if it had just focused on what he was saying rather than where he said it and my comment is also worse because I included this paragraph. We should probably ban mentioning that this is HN on HN.
He said something like "OS apps have the quality of being windows, you can open different windows into the same data" (okay he literally said "bringing knowledge from one app to another" but it can be re-framed as bringing different apps to the same knowledge - which I argue is more characteristic of the "local experience").
Your "refutation" was to list a few web apps that are considered useful.
A more sane way to refute his argument is to talk about open APIs and how you can bring your data into different contexts using these tools as well as GUI web tools like these things for converting file types, making small adjustments to PDFs, GSuite or other tools.
However that refutation falls on its face when you want the window quality; i.e. looking at the same data with different perspectives. The reason is that the computers running these web systems are foreign and disjoint so you are dealing with a distributed system, sometimes you are lucky enough that it was designed to function how you are using it (google suite is this to some extent), however most of the time you have to bring your data to them to use these utilities and then things float out of sync as you move between tools and your Downloads folder fills up with intermediate artefacts.
We are moving back to the local system, and Electron (and those browser APIs for local storage and persistence) are steps in the conversion process. Eventually we will abandon browsers (read: Chrome) altogether in favor of "package management"; something like nix-shell (except secure) has a much more user-friendly social contract while being pretty much the same UI as a browser (but still much much much worse UX). That's where we will end up (some evidence: NLNet is funding the nix-packaging of all the projects they support).
Web apps come from a tradition of engaging the user. This means (first order) to keep people using the app, often with user-hostile strategies: distraction, introducing friction, etc.
Native desktop apps come from a tradition of empowering the user. This means enabling the user to accomplish something faster, or with much higher quality. If your app distracts you or slows you down, it sucks. "Bicycle for the mind:" the bicycle is a pure tool of the rider.
The big idea of desktop apps - heck, of user operating systems at all - is that users can bring their knowledge from one app to another. But web apps don't participate in this ecosystem: they erode it. I try a basic task (say, Undo), and it doesn't work, because web apps are bad at Undo, and so I am less likely to try Undo again in any app.
A missing piece is a force establishing and evolving UI conventions. It is absurd that my desktop feels mostly like it did in 1984. Apple is trying new stuff, but focusing on iPad (e.g. cursors); we'll have to see if they're right about it.