Since the reasons to write a desktop app were negated in the article, I'm curious as to what sorts of applications some of the developers here write.

What about disk defragmenters, anti-virus/anti-malware, junk cleaners, file recovery, repair utilities, browsers, file managers, download managers, virtualization, image mounting, partition management, good text/hex editors, DEs & compilers, network tools, &c.

Or is no one supposed to have a desktop and some semblance of control over their OS in the near future? Just boot a rendering engine from ROM and go? What about the distant back ends for all those web apps?

Maybe all this is obvious, or someone will make a case for doing these things in HTML5 or that these things are unnecessary and will become unavailable. But I don't see any qualifier to the word "application" as used here.