The problem with electron is not the implementation - after all it is a bundled web browser and those are really really performant and written in C++. They pretty much make displaying a HTML document with complex CSS and running JavaScript as fast as possible (or at least close to it)

The problem is the abstraction level, instead of a locally running program manipulating objects that are turned into render instructions basically in a one-to-one fashion, there is a whole added indirection with generating and parsing HTML and then converting the dynamically created DOM into renderable elements.

Indeed, and this "back to the TUI" I advocate isn't restricted to developer tools. I actually think of such replacement with end users in mind.

Maybe not necessarily something as radical as terminals, but anything providing the same programming ergonomics (in order to be easy to build and maintain) and constrained by the same restrictions (so that functional requirements get tamed).

At first, it would definitely sound as an involution, but I feel somehow confident that the market in general will accept such constraints as soon as the results become evident.

I'm doing that lately -- very gradually and slowly, but I'm doing it.

I've had enough of today's slow buggy messes that require gigabytes of memory and two CPU cores to show me a splash screen for 10 seconds.

A lot of the TUI apps I stumbled upon seem really well-done.