Has it failed? Or is the current state that people prefer “native” apps to this kind of rich interactivity with long lived state? And instead the browser is a place that feels like it’s going to load a somewhat interactive document. The front end work here is often seen as grunt work on top of backend services and not a discipline in its own right.

So instead the awesome front end dev has switched from making something like Slack or VS Code work great in Chrome to building it in something like Electron for native experiences.