Comment by ryandrake
To you and OP, as the movie goes: "Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man."
My opinion is that we could use fewer "web applications" and more web pages that simply provide structured semantic data and then get out of the way and let the User Agent (and user himself) control the presentation of that data. Sure, some things have to be a web application. I'll grit my teeth and admit that. But many, many sites we visit could easily be raw HTML and maybe some CSS (which the User Agent is free to cherry-pick through or ignore). They would be fast, functional, accessible, (probably) more secure, (probably) more private, free of telemetry, and would better serve the user's interests over the web company's interests.
Instead we get JavaScript "instructions" from the web site, which require the User Agent to faithfully execute, often removing the user's direct access to the actual content and enforcing the web developer's opinion on how it should be presented.
If we had more use of standard controls and light markup, and less JavaSludge, maybe browsers would devote more time towards fixing and improving their standard controls.
Just another random person's opinion, but this has been a terrible direction for the web.
The whole reason we need web "applications" when a simple web site will do all boils down to the demands of marketing and advertising. If you were to go to a major news organization's web site, the bulk of the javascript isn't for frontend UI frameworks, but advertising. Go to a video streaming platform, and they do Weird Things not to prevent scraping, but to inject marketing analytics for advertisers even when you're on an ad-free plan.
Marketing and advertising makes the world a worse place. When you look at the real numbers, it rarely achieves whatever business goals it's supposed to achieve, though for some reason they keep throwing money at the crap because maybe this time it will be different.