it seems ridiculous that we have to embed an entire browser, meant for internet web browsing, just to create a cross-platform UI with moderate ease.
Why are native or semi-native UI frameworks lagging so far behind? am I wrong in thinking this? are there easier, declarative frameworks for creating semi-native UIs on desktop that don’t look like windows 1998?
It doesn’t embed Chromium, it uses the native webview that already exists on the system. The average app I make using Tauri is less than 15MB, and being Rust on the backend you can go as low level as you like. The Tauri API provides access in your front end code to all the native APIs you can think of.