Electron provides some nice integrations with the base OS that you can access with JS. However, such abstraction, although maybe not as complete as the one in Electron, can be easily written so that the native browser can be used as the main renderer. As long as the application works across all browsers, it will remain small and pretty much portable. You still need to update the browser wrapper through which is more annoying than pushing some code to a web server.
> You still need to update the browser wrapper through which is more annoying than pushing some code to a web server.
Yes, you'd need to update and build apps for each native platform separately, but the end result would be worth it. We're talking about maybe halving ram usage simply by writing a little more native code to package up our javascript
