Hard to say back then, but I think speed may have been a software issue as well. The hardware simply over powered the problem, caching or whatever it might have been.. I think this as just about anyone who switched to SSD saw significant speed improvement.
Electron gets mixed reviews and I am not knowledgeable to have an informed opinion. I do have an opinion on having to phone home for all activities though. If sync is not right now then searches are incomplete post changes, for some time, from seconds to many seconds. If a use case involves editing and searching in succession, not so good. A local client and database never had the issue for me.
Sync lag and the loss of local notebooks with V10 were enough to get me to exit. 🤷♂️