The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.
I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.
Sigh.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
Then I would say you have never understood HTML. Using tables for layout conflates content/structure/semantics with presentation and this is a problem in general with the HTML standards prior to HTML4 Strict. The reasons why this is bad have been expounded upon for near thirty years and are well known. HTML tables are not a “base tool” for layout.
A good litmus test for bad Web-design is “does it fail on screen readers?”. Indeed this does; it makes pages near unnavigable.