Are they? It's probably been a decade since I touched a native GUI (and I was without a mentor and working on already-old software) so I legitimately don't know. Using something like Visual Studio's form builder was fine enough, but it was not a very expressive toolset as I recall.
Web you can get started "instantly". Your browser covers most of the tooling you need and you can tweak any live site.
I don't like that that's how it is. From an abstract perspective I'd rather not be working on web because it seems like we're trying to make a better car by building a bicycle inside of it. But the low bar for entry is hard to beat.