This crops up a lot, shifting the blame from the web technologies to the developers who target those technologies, but where are the exceptions? What's the best example of a large, complex, efficient and responsive web-based application? It's easy to give examples of tragically inefficient and unresponsive web-based applications (Teams, Slack), but no one ever seems able to give a counterexample.
Pinboard and Hacker News are fast and efficient precisely because they make minimal 'application-like' use of the web platform.
Visual Studio Code is generally pretty responsive, but if I understand correctly there's little question that it uses vastly more computational resources than if it had been built using a 'conventional' (non-web-based) GUI toolkit.