With all due respect, I think the web’s layouting (or lack of) is the most complicated out of any framework I have ever used (including qt, swing, javafx, winforms, wpf). I think the great majority of web devs would have trouble recreating something like bulma (regarding layouting) even without responsiveness — I definitely would have quite a bit of trouble doing that.

So if anything, we are just accustomed to the web’s way and other (saner) approaches look stranger for some reason (even though with some insane complexity js frameworks come back and mimic the two decade old frameworks here and there)

Can you explain more the part about native apps being hard to make? I mean, I can open Xcode, start a new project, hit run, and there's an app ready to go, with a simulator and everything. It has API's that allow safe access to OS-level resources. It has powerful multi-threading, built-in views that I can reuse (like collections), stack based browsing is native, etc... Also, the client is not broken by default (I.e. client apps in the browser are by default spyware, at a technical level).

All the weird tooling that exists around actually getting html + js + css to work like an app is an indication to the contrary. The constantly evolving ecosystems is an indication of reaching stability, not having yet achieved it.

I will say though that targeting different platforms is an issue, which is not the same thing as your claim. Yes, targeting all platforms is hard, but I don't think any one native app ecosystem is really any harder than web.

I do think there's a lot of survivor bias from people whose job it is to build apps with web technologies.

And to your point that "it won". I don't think anyone, even lay-people, like electron-based apps. It's just what they have to use because there is an infinite amount of web developers. However, I feel that it's a bit premature to call call something that's ubiquitous that everyone hates as "winning".

Also, the most used software as a matter of time on task would probably be excel, email clients, and web browsers. All of these are built natively. So with the exception of slack, and taking a broad view of the road that lies ahead, most of the stuff that's built on electron is sort of vapor in the grand scheme of things.

I think we can actually expect to see more and more native apps, due to power consumption requirements. I stopped using Chrome years ago due to its aggressive power/memory consumption and never actually really looked back.

Any way, sorry for the unnecessarily long response, but seriously what you're saying is very hyperbolic. We are literally just at the beginning of the absolute beginning in terms of what technology is going to look like. Things will be very different in 5 years and super different in 10-20 years.

Has the web won on mobile? No. In fact there was a time in which Cordova-like apps were getting very popular, but react-native and then Flutter, Kotlin and Swift have ended that. Or at least that's my impression. react-native is almost like the web still though, but the fact that people are doing react-native and not Cordova must mean something.

Meanwhile, 10 years ago the only ways to do desktop native apps were the old -- very good, but old, with that old feel -- technologies like GTK and so on. Now there are these other things I cited above, and more! It's a renaissance.

But isn't this the danger of evaluating something via simple example?

You can make fine websites with just a text editor (although I'd argue how easy CSS is to use) but as soon as it needs to be an app you need JS code, and suddenly the difference isn't so great. Infact, I'd probably find a traditional prog-lang easier to use in that case.

I think the real advantage of JS is the robustness of its sandbox & permission system, that's what really needs reproducing.