You’d expect Electron to be more popular than Tauri because Electron pioneered the category of “use web tech to make mediocre desktop software” and Tauri is a johnny-come-lately that commits the cardinal sin of requiring that you care about the security of your app.

we can form theories about what sustains popularity – why do some frameworks and libraries go from strength to strength and while others plateau or even peter out.

My theory is fairly straightforward:

The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.