I agree with a lot of your points here. For example, I’d love to have a nice constraint system like you can have making an iOS. or even windows app. The problem is we have to work with HTML and the DOM, which aren’t nearly as nice to use out of the box as OS APIs. HTML/CSS/JS wasn’t designed for applications, it was built for basic document manipulation. But the pure accessibility and compatibility of the web is a better trade off for most products because it’s easier for people to find and use something on the web than downloading an app. So we’re forced to use worse tools.

I also don’t get the JS hate here. :) you certainly should not use react for your static resume site or blog. But react is a brilliant and necessary tool for web applications. If you don’t use it, you’ll end up making your own, probably worse abstraction for managing state and reactive updates.