Well not everyone is building websites on the web. Building an app for the web is not some horrible thing. Google docs, sheets, etc are all perfect examples of the kinds of apps suited to the web: ones that benefit from the ability to be accessed from anywhere on any device, and encourage collaboration.
We had this functionality before web apps were a thing. I'm not going to claim it was some golden era/glory days in a bug-free, seamless cross-device nirvana, but it's not like it was a wasteland, either. And for all the promise of cheaper, better apps that the webapp paradigm has been suggested to bring, we still pay a lot for armies of developers to write this stuff, and it's almost uniformly worse in both quality and feature completeness.
Yeah, this is the most damning thing. It’s clear that the web platform seems to resist being tamed with our current tooling. Adding more devs doesn’t fix it. As time goes on I become more skeptical that tooling can even fix it.
The impedance mismatch of a document viewer being made into a general app platform has yet to be truly overcome. All web apps try to eke out a living in the shadow of this.
That it seems to be everywhere these days is more a function of economics than anything else.
