It still requires you to build on each environments once to make the native dependencies work properly. Although I don't think it takes too much efforts to do that.
But besides that, signing binaries on mac is complex and requires you to pay $100 to apple. For someone that don't use mac at first place, they probably don't even bother do it.
Is this build somewhat complex and / or not guaranteed to run well?
I have absolutely no experience with Electron development, and actually believed that the cross-platform thing was free (or almost). Again, at least for apps that don't need special functions that could be platform dependent.
Technically it is free, until some native dependencies involve. Because you still need to setup build chains on each platform to make them compile. For example, vc on Windows, gcc on Linux, xcode on mac.
Besides that, unlike java, nodejs don't bundle a lot of stdlibs by itself.(It don't even have a lib for manipulate images!) So you end up being required to use custom native modules for some specific tasks.(If no js alternative available)
The nodejs way is build yourself, so you will have the right one. But since it is a bundled electron program, it doesn't work and you need to prebuild it.
