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i really think china is going to be the nation that makes huge breakthroughs with actual DEWs and coilguns.
stuff like that needs large, state managed projects to truly develop. each is like an Apollo program equivalent and we know the west just can't pull that off because the military industrial grift complex-vortex is just too strong now and the event horizon has been crossed.
china is going to: start a thorium-fission economy, possibly crack commercial fusion, and i bet even start mass production of solid state batteries before anyone else comes close
The main thing with those is just that there's not really a reason to use them over conventional firearms. Like gunpowder is ridiculously easy to mass produce and an extremely energy dense propellant to the point it doesn't really make sense to switch to less energy-dense batteries to launch slugs electromagnetically.
Railguns on the other hand seem to offer the potential to get projectiles moving at much higher velocities than the expansion of gunpowder would allow, if given enough power. The problem is that that would require a huge store of rapidly usable power and also getting velocities that a normal cannon can't do causes friction/arcing and oxidation of the rails after just a few rounds, meaning actually firing it totals the barrel in short order. So they have this theoretical "maybe this could replace over-the-horizon missiles for some tasks, if it could be worked out" but there's not much motivation to do that because the missiles are still cheaper and more accurate than a railgun would be and despite being a logistics hassle they're less of a logistics hassle than "this is the gun you get to fire like once and then replace the whole thing, we've got a few spares for that" would be.