Precisely. In some domains most customers will always choose the cheaper option. In those cases web apps resulted in a race to the bottom. Companies in those domains simply could not afford to cling to native software if they wanted to remain competitive.
But of course you still find lots of native software in domains where a critical mass of customers are willing to pay more (or sacrifice functionality) for qualities like performance, security, reliability, etc. For example: games, fintech, military, virtual reality, video production, realtime controllers. I've worked in a couple of those domains and in those cases I am confident that web apps are a very long way away from displacing native applications.
> everyone involved in it should be ashamed of the product they're turning out
Before judging people for their decisions it's worth understanding why they make them.
I know many developers who take pride in writing extremely performant software. All of them have either shifted to work for companies that are willing to pay them to do that or they've swallowed their pride to feed their kids and they scratch that itch by tinkering with open source or game dev on the weekends.
> Now we certainly have more options but like, what good is more options that suck?
I am not arguing that this situation makes your life better. It doesn't. I sympathize with your frustration and I also like using (and making) performant software.
What I am trying to do is explain how we got here because I think it could help us find a way out. We either have to make performant software significantly cheaper to build or we have to convince customers to pay significantly more for it.