Hey, cool question!
It's been a while since I've done "traditional" GUI programming (I've done a bit of GTK back in the days, looked at QT some, etc.) but I definitely agree with both the "hellish" and "awful" labels.
I think GUI will always be hard, and even though I ~like the modern web tools we have available (like reactive UIs, immutable data structures, the Chrome developer tools, etc.) it is definitely its own kind of hell.
That said, as far as the shell is concerned (creating a window, menu, interacting with the host OS), Electron has been treating us very nicely, and will get you started quite quickly.