I know it's a defacto complaint to leverage against Electron apps, but memory usage notwithstanding, I've never run into much lag issue on any major Electron app.
Perhaps this file is just the installer and the actual system files are much larger? Or maybe your 400MB figure comes from a bloated install? Just speculating here.
A compressed download is my guess. The easiest way to predict if an app is using Electron is to see if the download is around 90 to 130 MB. Especially if that size feels unreasonable for the functionality that it offers.
It depends. Numerous times when internet is spotty Slack and Discord both on different occasions have brought my systems to a halt until they can complete whatever task is stuck waiting (or I force close them).
It's really fucking obnoxious that somehow a goddamn web app in a wrapper is managing to cause system wide hangs.
No, they typically do not interfere with performance at the OS level. They may be wasteful with resources that are limited — CPU/GPU/RAM/IO — but for them to interfere with system function at this level is not the usual bloatware problem.
I’ve never noticed anything before, though I’m sure their performance is worse than native apps. I think the M series has so much headroom at this point that you can get away with a lot.