So Ripcord is created by one person in his spare time and it performs blazingly-fast and supports Slack whilst Slack's own client is maintained by tens if not hundreds of engineers and it still performs slower when joining more teams, consumes significant amounts of RAM and they create this blog-post about performance improvements whilst still using Electron.
Understanding on why Slack is unable to create a performant desktop-client for their users is beyond me. I also wasn't able to use Slack and Discord at the same time on my MacBook without it swapping on the SSD. So Ripcord seems to be a good lightweight alternative for me.
I just wish it supported Keybase Chat so I can ditch that Electron garbage too.
I would love to see someone study this from a management / human factors perspective. I can think of all sorts of reasons why a team can't perform as well as an individual, ranging from the team needing to support more use cases than the individual does (onboarding via the web was super important for Slack's growth, I'd bet), everyone thinking it's not their place to rethink some major decision, some major decision being rethought but execution stuck in a team that isn't performing well, etc. And I'd be really curious, if you were in charge of a large organization, how to make it as effective as a single person (while still handling all the broad edge cases that large organizations do handle).
I suspect that "Why is Linux competitive with Windows" has many of the same answers, in the end.