Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial amount.
The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.
> Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code
I'm making this up, but perhaps this was beneficial for UI consistency across apps anyway?
Yes it was. But such consistency is double edged sword because it also leads to “if all you have is a hammer” UIs where UI elements are abused for roles that they shouldn’t be used for, because the alternative custom UI costs so much development time.
In general I’d say UIs are much better these days functionally, at the cost of much less consistent look and feel (UX) across apps.
The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.