but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.

Hard disagree on “little”.

Software designed for “native first” experiences like Flutter aren’t as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.

Popularity should not be dictated by what web devs prefer. As long as they build for desktop, I won’t pardon excessive resource usage. And I’m not talking about Flutter. Better performance oriented frameworks exist, see sciter.