The trade-off was/is that building software as easily as late 90's desktop applications is extremely difficult to do on the web; in fact, we're still not there. Surprisingly, no-one has made a Delphi (or Access) clone that runs on the web. It seems like we're getting there, but incredibly slowly and only asymptotically approaching that experience.
On the bright-side, webapps have invented some novel and useful ways of writing applications that are in some ways superior to the old ways - the ideas behind React (in particular, rendering application state as a single function), or Redux (modeling application state as a monolithic, immutable object against which reducers run) may not have arisen if not for this shift. I'd also credit JavaScript with making functional programming mainstream, a great example of "worse is better".
Another part of the issue may be that younger programmers are simply not aware of the DX of building with tools like Delphi or Access. And in turn, older programmers have forgotten the headaches of dealing with closed-source tools and the distribution headaches that came with them. (And the ones who are aware are themselves unaware of the DX of building with Smalltalk.) You cannot miss what you never experienced or do not know about.