HTML is declarative. The machine understands it. I like things machines can understand and optimize. Things that you can write automated tools to work with because it's not a full turing machine. If you want to make a screen reader, you can. If you want to reflow for mobile in a better way, you can, because you know what's text and what's an image.

Just giving people a programming environment and the ability to draw some pixels, the browser has no idea what the intent is. There's nothing to optimize unless the individual sites do, and I doubt they have Google and Mozilla's budget.

We already have too many unnecessary powerful imperative systems out there.

Think Autodesk products. Certain parts (wasm modules) only load when you hover over a menu while overall app loads within milliseconds because it just has the main window and such.