As a former Microsoft employee who used to work on Internet Explorer (I helped build the new developer tools), I will say I believe he's partly right here.

I do think it has a lot to do with Electron and I also think their acquisition of GitHub had a lot to do with this also. But maybe not for the reasons this author is thinking. I don't think they're thinking of it as a scourge or a performance problem but the opposite, a savior of the desktop so to speak.

To understand why I say this I think we have to go back and talk about the history of .NET, XAML and their relationship with Windows. It's interesting to note that XAML was originally created by shifting a lot of developer resources away from IE6 and onto the WPF team, this was why IE6 sat stagnant for a long time, the developers were gone! What they then made was the windows presentation foundation for what later became known as Longhorn, which ended up being a pretty large disaster. Longhorn largely failed because they attempted to rewrite the windows shell using .NET and WPF. At the time (and still frankly) WPF had lots of really bad memory leaks, memory consumption issues, GC issues and a variety of other bugs and performance issues. This is why Longhorn was scrapped and what they ended up doing is to straight up revert the Windows codebase back several years to pre-longhorn and then subsequently worked overtime for another 3 years to crank out the gem known as Vista. Some people don't remember Vista fondly but frankly it was a Hurculean effort and a genuine evolution considering the prior turmoil that caused it. Or, in other words, it could have been worse.

So ever since Longhorn the Windows team has had an extremely bitter attitude towards .NET. I don't think its completely fair as they essentially went all in on a brand new technology and .NET has done a lot of evolving since then but nonetheless that sentiment remains among some of the now top players in Microsoft. So effectively there is a sentiment that some of the largest disasters in Microsoft history (IE's fall from grace and multiple "bad" versions of Windows) are, essentially, totally the fault of gambling on .NET and losing. And that sentiment can sometimes show in decisions like this.

So when Microsoft went to make their new metro apps for windows 8/10, they almost didn't even support XAML apps but only C++ and javascript. It was only the passion of the .net developer community that pushed it over the edge and made them let .net into the store as a first class type of app in the app store.

But here we are now and the store is not super successful and writing html+js applications for the Windows Store Apps is very unpopular and painful and here they are virtually retiring WPF and acquiring new html desktop technologies and freeing up a lot of js+html developer resources...

So what I think they intend on doing is adding features to electron and windows store which would enable developers to easily ship electron apps directly to their store. To do this they're going to have to add in some significant work into electron to be able to access the sandbox store api's and make it as transparent as possible to the api's that are already there. I think they see this as _revitalizing_ desktop applications. Because right now one of the major complaints people have is not that its hard to make a windows app but its hard to make a windows app and a mac app and a linux app... If you have enough resources and those individual experiences are important enough to you then fine, make 2-3 native apps, but for a small operations it's just not wise for anyone tether themselves to a technology that only lets them deliver on one platform.