I don’t understand why the entire browser engine needs to be bundled with each app.
Why not have libchrome or a libelectron that moves more slowly than chrome six week release cycle (maybe do 6 months) then have apps build to it and share the library.
A shared electron package used by a few different apps: see the "required by" column...
As electron gets more popular, this will be the standard in Linux distributions (at least historically thats how dependencies handled there), Windows has different standard (self contained everything) so there it is the normal way - everybody already used to it for decades...
Developers target a runtime with very specific APIs. If the runtime changes developers wouldn't even bother to write the apps.
If Electron apps would specify requirements instead of bundling the whole runtime, you will have to wait for the runtime to be downloaded the first time the app runs. You will still end up with multiple versions of the same runtime running on your system.
Why not have libchrome or a libelectron that moves more slowly than chrome six week release cycle (maybe do 6 months) then have apps build to it and share the library.