I do not want everyone to be wizards. I want those who practice technology magecraft to stop rushing toward the bottom. I want to see less rationalization of lowest-common-denominator development as the best there is—or, at its most charitable, an improvement on good things that already exist, because this is often borne of an inherent laziness to learn, use, and improve great tools. I've seen way too much frank discussion among frontend web developers who are doing things with HTML/CSS/JS because it's all they know, and now they can do other things with it, not because using HTML/CSS/JS is technologically superior, easier, faster, more performant, better suited to the job, etc. It's because they can use what they know, and don't have to pick up a new skill. I find this to be worrisome, analogous to manual laborers being unwilling to learn new skills to remain competitive and employable.

I am also not offended that people find value in simple things.

To place myself in my own line of fire:

There are languages I like, and others I don't. There are languages I use daily that I love and hate. I'd love to have a solid, cross-platform GUI toolkit in my language of choice. I want to be able to write applications by my own subjective measure of what I think is good for the job, how much I like the language, etc. I find it pretty sad that I can't just do that—say, write a truly native desktop app with Elixir, or Go, or Python, or what-have-you. But then I realize there are languages and tools that are already built for doing this. I just don't want to use/learn them. Or don't feel like I have the time. So, I'm just as guilty of wanting to use my pet technology of choice on all my problems. However, I recognize this, and I don't try to rationalize it as wanting to use a better paradigm or conceptual model. I just want to use the tools I want to use. Sadly, they don't always fit.

I can't help but wonder what cool tools we'd have to practice our magecraft if all the time invested in bringing JS everywhere had been put elsewhere.

Objective-C, to reuse that example, has plenty of warts. But it really outshines using the web stack to build native apps for desktop/mobile. Swift is even more pleasant in many ways. You use one language that's built for the job. You always think in that language. You don't have to create style sheets, use a DOM, or use JS bridges to things already made to do the job and do it well. Someone else already said in the thread that using a document model for applications is simply not the write paradigm. But we've grown so accustomed to shoehorning our ideas into a document model, we struggle to recognize this is flawed.

Cross-platform and sans-browser development would be so much easier if there was a single GUI toolkit used on all OSes. Electron has grown so popular because people want to build desktop apps, and they want them to run on as many platforms as possible, while looking and functioning identically. But it brings problems, overhead, and other pains because you're building an application for desktops using the browser stack.

Maybe one day we'll see this situation improve. Or maybe I'll give in like everyone else. Despite my ire, I am frequently impressed when someone creates yet another do-thing-in-JS tool ... and depressed.

Lastly, I think you meant find solace, not solitude.