> You say "just about the worst option imaginable", but the evidence doesn't really suggest that.

Notably, the anti-web mob almost never bothers to articulate why it is they think the web is bad at all! This is another classic case, of inchoate disparagement, with no specific claims to be backed nor refuted.

I want to be a sponge, to embrace good ideas, to hear & listen to what people think might improve or enhance things. But there's rarely real problems cited (or there are gross mis-understandings), and much rarer still is a better path or possibility articulated. I'd love some genuine discussion of the web, but the silent majority seems ok-enough or better working the web regularly, and the protestors against the web tend towards blunt & undirected.

One conflict I do see as visible again and again is the expectation of what the web should be. There seems to be quite a lot of hostility to the web being a low level platform, to it not having a single consistent development style. This leads to a lot of "the web was never meant to do this!" sort of feelings, but that doesn't really argue whether this iterated adaptability the Document Object Model has spawned serves us well or poorly.

One thing that is true is that the DOM is a low level platform, that it's not higher level. It doesn't compactly solve all or even most of the problems. To me, this is the critical value of the web, that which makes it so much better & more powerful: that we are free to express multiple architectures, free to innovate our UI patterns & do so, while still keeping the same underlying bones. This has begat great cross pollination across many different tribes of webdevelopment, has continued to make the web a crossroads of development, where many ideas cross paths & new ventures, new trials are began. It compares versus near-literally everything else, where isolated communities come and go (even within corporate walls, e.g. Microsoft's GDI, WPF, Silverlight, WinUi, DirectDraw, WinRT, UWP/Uno, .NET MAUI, or GTK's major 1, 2, 3, 4, & Adiwata reworks), ideas for how to make interfaces rise & fall, never quite satisfying.

There's protests against the web being fast enough, but frankly it's horsepucky. The browser is intensely optimized & stunningly fast at all kinds of things. It does not however prevent mis-use, prevent bad code. Often installing ad-blockers (something not doable in apps note you) is enough to get users to lightspeed.

The web has made a great Bazaar, a great place for a conflux of possibilities, and has proven vastly malleable as a medium & platform, boosted so much further by it's connectivity-at-the-core versus applications which bolt-it-on, and given far greater reach than the developer-centric gui toolkits of yore. So much is possible here, and the great reverberating om keeps giving, keeps exploring. But, it feels like, so many just want the Cathedral, the one specific incarnation that is well shaped, that everyone can just do. I just hope we can have some discussions about what would make a good Cathedral, what properties & virtues it would have, because i think the Bazaar will probably ultimately accomplish those ends better, but if we can't engage & discuss, no one wins.