Considering Facebook engineering has gone into detail about how the new site is much faster and transmits much less JS and CSS, I would be a little surprised if the opposite is true. I tend to not implicitly trust HN comments about things being extremely slow, because for whatever reason there are so many of these complaints I’ve never experienced myself. I still haven’t even had performance problems with Electron apps, and those seem to be widely panned on HN as having abysmal performance. They work fine for me.
I’ve had Slack running on multiple Macs for years. I have plenty of complaints about Slack, but none involve performance. What’s the actual complaint? Do people just look at their memory usage and see Slack taking a lot, and if so, is that actually a problem?
The problem is to install such a distractive application like Slack as an app on your computer. I leave these kind of solutions all in their website so I can control when I want to see messages. So neither accepting desktop notifications. That's nice thing about async messaging solutions, no expectation you respond within in a second.
If they need to talk straight away they can call :)