I think the author is already addressing this:
Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.
Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.
Just a simple example: it's trivially easy to make large, flat shaded buttons on the web. That's going to be more familiar to younger users than native web buttons like those on HN.
However, there's also spending weeks to make a web button that animates smoothly from one container to another and has a SVG icon that morphs into another different icon with magic sparkles. Doing that on the web will require grossly perverting the DOM and all of the web interaction expectations.
A lot of the things we consider "Just 2016 App Things" are performances that native app builders have to do to give clients a reason to believe their $300/hour is well spent. No real value is produced except "design" awards for the shelf.
I recall an article by Zynga (maybe in Gamasutra? Can't find it now) that talked about user retention in relation to "rewards." They said that it's essentially a pure win to make every single action a user performs reward them in some way. Not a big reward—not a "points in a video game" kind of reward—but at least a pretty sound and an unexpectedly smooth animation (vis. "magic sparkles.") These things do make a difference, and it pays (in a competitive niche) for your app to do them. Just like B2B apps are sold mostly on checkbox features, B2C apps are sold mostly on how pretty they look doing their job in the app-store video.
If it's possible to do it with the new CSS animations (which should be reasonably well accelerated on modern browsers) and gracefully degrade by... y'know, not having the animations play, that's probably the ideal compromise right there. If you start restructuring your DOM in the name of easier animations or flashier effects, you've gone too far.
[0]: http://www.ella.net/pdfs/comScore-US-Mobile-App-Report-2014....
I'm going back to my Emacs editor. ;-)
[0]: http://digitalkidssummit.com/2014/10/01/kids-6-12-in-the-us-...