I was. But people are always missing a point.

There's a range of options between "can render millions of objects with complex animation and logic" in a few milliseconds and "we will warn you when you have 800 dom nodes on a static page, you shouldn't do many updates or any useful animations"

Somehow people assume that what HTML does is so insanely hard that the problem of 2D layout should not just be relevant to modern day supercomputers, but to be so slow as to be seen with the naked eye.

The 2D layout in HTML is slow because the DOM (with the millions of conflicting hacks on top of it) is slow, not the other way around.

We could do most of the frankly laughable HTML layouts at least in early 2000s, perhaps earlier.

Well, definitely earlier, as Xerox that influenced the Mac is from 1970s