>It's one of the most inefficient, slow, resource hungry app platforms that humanity has ever devised.

Is it? JavaScript interpreters are crazy fast, almost comparable to compiled languages. The layout engines are powerful and efficient. They support extremely-optimized networking protocols and media formats.

It's not (currently) a great platform for high-poly 3D rendering and such, but who knows what the future holds with wasm and WebGPU.

Browsers do use a lot of memory, but so did Java, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, etc.