Yeah it's true. Of course native code will perform by default faster and be more battery friendly, but V8 is also very optimized and can perform easily like 80% of native speeds if given some thought.
Yeah many people do not just have the time to look into this, and most companies don't really care, as we have so much RAM and CPU power these days, so I can see why for example many messaging apps just choose to write their app in Electron, instead of trying to figure out how to do it natively cross-platform, which can be a more PITA especially when you also have web as a platform.
I think there's a complexity in doing that which could be summarized as follows: it's possible, but the more complex your codebase, the more difficult it is to reason about how to get to or maintain that 80%.
Even if we assume that 80% is the maximum, if most products (or the notable ones that we all complain about, I suppose) are hitting 50%, then... well, that's a problem.
For full disclosure: I've defended Electron on the merits of "there is sadly no better way to ship cross-platform UI-based software". I criticize it with this in mind.
Yeah maybe 80% was over-estimated. Depends on the usecase, I've also seen 50% in more cases, but at least according to my experience 70-80% is realistic in some cases.
Yeah many people do not just have the time to look into this, and most companies don't really care, as we have so much RAM and CPU power these days, so I can see why for example many messaging apps just choose to write their app in Electron, instead of trying to figure out how to do it natively cross-platform, which can be a more PITA especially when you also have web as a platform.