Discussion
It seems like the non-web end-user software industry, outside of Apple, has broadly given up on using a shared runtime provided by the platform for the higher layers of the UI stack.
Windows: Microsoft is now pushing the Windows App SDK, which includes but is bigger than WinUI 3.
Android: Jetpack Compose is its own GUI toolkit, though using the platform-provided, Skia-based canvas.
Desktop Linux with Flatpak: Goes furthest, pinning the whole userland stack to a specific runtime version.
1/?
And then of course there's Electron, where each app ships its own copy of Chromium. And at least one Electron developer has explicitly said that their team chose Electron over an OS-provided web view because they didn't want to be tied to the OS's update cycle, and particularly the unavailability of OS updates on older machines (particularly Macs), for bug fixes and enhancements to the UI stack.
2/?
Yes, I should have provided a citation about the rationale behind using Electron. This is from a developer who worked on Slack for desktop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087042
Or this earlier comment that directly references Slack in first-person plural: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24744591
Or this one written in between, also referencing Slack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204802
Now, it seems likely that using a native GUI provided by the platform is safer than using a platform-provided web view. But still, fonts keep evolving, especially with the rise of emoji but probably also for non-western scripts as well, so I guess one justification for using a text stack that's part of a runtime bundled with the app is that the app's users can continue to get the latest updates in text rendering even if they can't update to the latest version of Windows or macOS.
And the Rust GUI ecosystem is mostly doing the whole stack, from the widgets through text layout and down to actual rendering, in Rust, statically linked into the application, with the aim of using OS native APIs only where the toolkit developers deem it truly necessary.
3/?
The ideal used to be that the platform would provide everything needed for a rich UI, the application developers could just ship their app, and the UI would automatically get better, including on tricky things like the interaction between font rendering and light versus dark mode, as the platform updated. That seems to have failed outside of Apple-native apps by indie developers (and Apple itself). Now apps have to update their pinned runtime dependencies, even when the runtime is first-party.
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