The big advantage of doing it this way is that, for users, it Just Works. They never get incomprehensible error messages telling them that they've got an incompatible version of libwhatever.dll when they try to load your app. I remember well the bad old days of Java desktop apps in the early 2000s, where this problem was omnipresent. Moving away from that was a major boon to users, and I don't ever want to go back.

It's 2017 and we still can't distribute software or manage libraries. For some reason content addressability based on hashes for libraries has never occurred to anyone.

Not that I disagree, but the downside is that you would have the browser fragmentation that alot of people use electron to avoid.

There is a project that actually does something in those lines.

https://github.com/nodekit-io/nodekit

Instead of embedding a browser engine and Node in each application, it uses the available ones in the platform it's running.