> modern features like type inherence, null-safe, closure
This is one of the more annoying problems with our industry. People rediscover solutions from 60s and 70s and sell them as if they were new and revolutionary...
I don't think we're ever going to go back to that. Those UIs were pretty static, i.e. you only created the "initial state" in the UI designer, and then modified it during the application run-time (sometimes even creating new widgets in code), or attached some kind of data-binding models to it.
With the popularity of things like React, you now have a powerful way to express how the UI looks in every state, not just the initial one.
>Step 1: People realise that Electron apps look different and do not fit the OS.
This is not an issue for most people. I like to use Spotify (the desktop app) as an example - it's a pretty good looking app, works nicely, and yet it uses an HTML-based UI.
Microsoft's own UWP also looks vastly different than native Win32-based apps.
The resource usage and slowness of Electron apps is a problem, but that is caused by using the entire browser runtime. When it comes to the capabilities of a UI framework, one of the questions I ask is "Could you build something like Spotify's UI with this? How difficult would it be?".
Dunno, may be you are right. With the advance of flexbox there finally would be a possibility to do good old delphi-like anchors for responsive UI. In a WYSIWYG editor. Without spitting out hardly maintable brittle javascript which simply manages layout (something which is framer.com/other designer tools can do right now).
So far the facebook stack and react-desktop seems to be the best candidate for that description, but I don't neceserily think people would focus on getting it to the desktop styling. Universal Material UI (or similar?) probably would overtake that approach.
Now we just need something which would take care of the 'R'.
The time you needed to develop an app with those 90's RAD tools wouldn't even be sufficient to setup the build pipeline for those trendy JS frameworks.
I will only agree, the day someone makes a RAD based React WYSIWYG editor that can at very least compete with Microsoft Blend, Android Studio or XCode just to give a few examples.