Every single distro maintaining their own version of every single Linux app is just a lot of work that wouldn't need to be done if there was a way of making a version that worked on every distro out of the box. Plus that way app devs don't have to worry about trying to hunt down every weird bug that only comes up occasionally while doing a specific thing using a specific version of a specific library that only one distro uses.

None of them are better than a well maintained native app from your distro. In fact, realistically they kinda have to be at least a little worse than an actually well maintained one. If you include all the time spent maintaining native apps, universal formats are potentially orders of magnitude less work to maintain if they become the default though, and that is valuable. Valuable enough that a lot of the people doing that work are pushing for them pretty hard.