It does make sense, not a lot of people seem to be interested though - https://github.com/pojala/electrino

There are a few options.

http://alternativeto.net/software/electron/

One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.

Like to see Alternatives to electron as well - even super optimized electron on code Atom and Google Chrome are quite heavy on a MacBook Air

I remember XULrunner was fine like 15 years ago on a Pentium II. A lot less features and performance tho.

If you don't mind doing your UI in canvas (maybe with react-canvas) then these two look interesting, although Nidium doesn't seem to support desktop anymore. https://www.nidium.com/ http://impactjs.com/ejecta

Also, any election alternatives for desktop that specifically don't use a browser DOM? Something like react native for Linux/osx/windows or QT.

There is Brig (https://github.com/BrigJS/brig) but despite the fact that QML and JavaScript are already "married", and the immense popularity of both Qt and JS, it's far, far, away from Electron's maturity.