I meant that as a nod to the person to whom you're replying, as well as the author of the article. Of course it's possible for indie developers to build native apps — but I don't begrudge them for avoiding that route, especially if their day job doesn't involve it. I am perfectly fine with criticizing giant companies for building chat apps atop Electron.
Slack has, to put it mildly, plenty of money, and gave us a 300MB bloated client. Ripcord is a payware alternative client made by a single developer.
Things seem to be precisely backward.