Comment by seansh

If you only care about desktop and don't want to maintain a server, I do suggest taking a look at webview [1]. It uses the platform's own web browser engine (WebKitGTK on linux, WebKit on mac, WebView2 on win) which you can use to run your app using the web stack. Essentially, it gives you something like electron.js but without the excessive bloat. And you get access to the file system and everything else on the desktop.

I believe there are other libraries/frameworks on github with a similar approach you might want to have a look at.

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview