Chrome was made to fracture, and everything started with the aptly named “Atom” editor (they “invented” Electron).
Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.
KDE invented Electron, when they built KHTML as independently embeddable HTML + CSS + JS engine.
Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)
Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.
Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.
And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.
Microsoft invented Electron, when Windows Active Desktop came to be.
Mozzilla also invented Electron, when XUL applications were a thing.
Both failed, as shipping regular processes with the default browser kept being used.