@mathew My understanding of the complaints I've seen raised so far isn't rooted in the hatred for an applications delivery platform. I think, on the whole, they're accepted as useful.

The pushback (at least amongst my peers) seems to be centered almost entirely around the extremely poor fit the current set of technologies seems to be for delivering that platform. And, with that in mind, I find myself sympathetic: HTML should stick with delivering documents. It's what it is good at.

Technologies such as WebAssembly offers some promise to finally provide a proper applications delivery platform. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be adopting it, at least not for that purpose.

How so? Apple computers were always somewhat popular in the US, so at least US developers had to have them in mind. It was indeed a very different story in Russia — everyone, literally everyone used Windows, and no one ever considered that other OSes exist.

And for all the application stuff, we've already had a solution, it was called Flash. After all these years, the web still hasn't caught up with it.

And cross-platform GUI apps? These simply better not exist. The proper way is to have a "core" library shared across platforms, and make a native GUI for each platform you support. Many companies are doing this exact thing already with their mobile apps.