Electron app is not a native Linux client, it is just a browser app.
If you ran that app in a tab it gives you much better performance and less memory used.
That all depends on how the app is written. The idea of Electron is to bring the web app frontend experience to apps which are fundamentally not able to run in a browser, such as VS Code, Etcher, etc. Writing to raw device files, listening to ports, using the full CPU resources and timers not available in the browser, using more memory, etc.
If you just package an existing website into an Electron app that is a waste of time and user resources. Electron is intended to combine a web-based presentation/UI layer with a Node.js layer that supports access to native resources, unlimited storage, persistence outside the browser, etc. If you are not making meaningful use of these capabilities a PWA would be sufficient.
Overall, I do prefer native apps, although there are examples out there such as VS Code that have achieved UI excellence without it. Although, I really only like that on macOS... on Windows I prefer the older Windows Forms style rather than the new Modern UI, and on Linux there is a bit of style mismash between Qt and GTK apps already.
The point is that its effectively a web app.
> What value does electron add to the user?
They have a desktop app faster than if it was being built natively.