I think this marks why Hacker News is biased against Electron. I really appreciate your eager to develop desktop applications, but Electron apps are _not_ native. It brings web technologies to the desktop. This is clearly an advantage for web developers, as it, as you just said, lowers the barrier to entry. Custom UIs are in my opinion also much easier to develop using Electron - this is exactly what HTML/CSS/JS were designed for. But these apps don't fit into the operating system. They use few of the available APIs, they are restricted to a common layer of abstraction, which means they can only use features available on Windows/OS X/Linux and none of the platform specific features, they are always "statically linked" (what I mean is every Electron app ships it's own libraries and the whole framework itself), etc.

As you said, Electron clearly has its advantages. But I appreciate the effort when a developer creates an application using the target platform's native language, frameworks and usage patterns (in this case, Swift, AppKit and the Cocoa APIs). The result is, in my opinion, clearly worth the effort and a wonderful piece of software to use.