Is it? ffmpeg as a library can decode about anything you want and put it in a buffer in less than 100 lines. Is that not for free? It's a self contained shared library.
Electron apps have the slowest interfaces on anything I've seen, lots of times each click of a button or menu has lag on a very solid computer. Who wants to have a program doing video embedded in a painfully slow interface?
What do you mean by lifecycle and fallbacks? Also you just said that building in multimedia was the problem and when I point out libraries are easy to use and modular you say that C++ is the problem.
I think you are giving too much credit to people using electron. It really seems to be mostly people who haven't really looked at their options avoiding native languages at the expense of the user. If all someone knows is javascript and they don't really care about their users' lag or resources, then electron is any easy choice.
Electron apps have the slowest interfaces on anything I've seen, lots of times each click of a button or menu has lag on a very solid computer. Who wants to have a program doing video embedded in a painfully slow interface?