What is interesting is that local first applications were the Microsoft vision in the 1990s with a Windows computer acting as your home hub and syncing over the internet.
The Sun and later Google vision is the network is the computer. For better or worse, the Sun/Google vision is ascendent now.
Building desktop apps remains a chore. A lot of crossplatform frameworks are promising (Electron, Flutter, etc) but ask any developer building series enterprise applications in those tools how fun it is and they will tell you it is not encouraging.
Constant ecosystem changes make it difficult to maintain strict low-level and high-level API boundaries and drivers across platforms. To get non-trivial projects done with high quality you need very experienced engineers who are comfortable dropping into low-level code as well as fork or build in-house versions of common libraries and tools that don't quite get the job done for your use-case.
Also there's a lot of hobby projects that are great and push boundaries but they're also often the only option for a given toolchain/language/framework. So its a very frustrating exercise to invest in a tool only to realize its half-baked (which is fair for a hobby project!) and you need to reverse course and rebuild or extend it yourself - even for simple things.
The Sun and later Google vision is the network is the computer. For better or worse, the Sun/Google vision is ascendent now.