> basically every platform has a much better way to create an app for it

I accidentally spent 4 hours writing a reply to your point here and it ended up being too long for HN's comment length limit, but I posted it to pastebin: https://pastebin.com/n6AGB62L

> The web is seriously so lacking on several trivial fronts that it is laughable

That depends on your project's requirements. Speaking from personal experience, my main beef is that HTML web-forms still lacks a loit of widgets necessary for RAD that native UIs have had for decades, like comboboxes, true hierarchical menus, RTF or Markdown text editing (because `contenteditable` is horrible), and so on.

...however, if you're enthused enough it's very possible and quite straightforward now to create your own controls and widgets from scratch, which is what Electron apps like Slack do. Of course, when you do, you're condemned to having to maintain them for eternity, but that's a cost of doing business.

> layouting being one example

Actually I was going to say that's exactly where CSS outshines platforms like WPF, XAML, even Cocoa (not to mention Swing and AWT - I can't speak for JavaFX as I've never used it).

I agree that for most of the past 20 years CSS has been a pain for so many layout issues ("how do I vertically center a div?" is probably the #1 question repeatedly asked on StackOverflow), but CSS's flexbox and CSS grid have been supported by all major browsers for almost a decade now and I can confidently say that I can build an aesthetic design with a layout that adapts to changing window/screen dimensions and aspect-ratios in a fraction of the time it would take me to do in any native framework.

Consider that 1990s-era frameworks like VB6, WinForms, etc were all fixed-layout and required you to write your own repositioning logic in resize-event-handlers. WinForms didn't get anchored-layout until 2005! Post-2000s frameworks like Swing and WPF added layout containers, but they're far from perfect and don't support radical re-layouting. More modern frameworks that use constraint-based layout or support major relayouting (like SwiftUI and WinUI 3, to an extent) are appealing, but I find offer few real advantages over CSS's layout model.

A major personal win for CSS is the content/behaviour/presentation separation (<div>-itis, not withstanding). Compared to WPF where a single XAML file will mix content, behaviour, and presentation elements, attributes, and controls without any regard for separation-of-concerns or maintainability (WPF does have CSS-esque Styles, but despite the name suggesting they're strictly presentational they're not: they're invariably used to control behaviour (due to XAML's ugly and unusable template and trigger ceremony) and also content (due to how content-based templates are used).

> while goddamn WinForms could deal with it through inheritence.

But that's where the failures of inheritance becomes obvious: consider WinForm's own Checkbox control. Surprisingly, the Checkbox is actually a subclass of Button, and shares no relationship with the intuitively similar Radio control despite their very similar visual appearance and behaviour. WinForms' design (like most other OOP-based frameworks) shoehorn both UX behaviour and visual appearance into a single OOP inheritance tree. This only works up-to-a-point, then things quickly fall-apart.