I would be interested in seeing a legit back and forth between this view and alternatives. Advocates of react, in particular, would be a good read after this.
It would take Google, Apple, and Microsoft coming together to define a new system of building as an alternative. Think things like, new client, new protocol, new language, perhaps not having to write anything resembling markup at all (the joy!),
Obviously the chances of this happening are nil. So we shuffle along adding yet another layer of transformation on top of these broken technologies, hoping it will be enough.
Perhaps in the future UIs can be rendered with WASM, with the common rendering libraries being distributed as a separate WASM module (so users would not have to repeatedly download large files)?
It isn't that any one of them is bad. But, having three seems to want to relate to a Conway's Law where you have three different "teams" somewhat collaborating with each other. In reality, far more is done by a single team than otherwise. Even when you have a graphics design team, often they build their first artifacts in other systems and then it is down to that single team to try and bridge them together.
There is also the absurd level of flexibility that was baked into CSS. Somewhat ironic that we are digging our way out of the limitations of CSS by adding more and more flexibility to it.
It was solved with Silverlight - declarative UIs in XAML. No CSS. Strongly typed C#. The downside was you needed to install the plugin.
So there are better ways than HTML/CSS/JS but we're stuck with them, because they are browser-native. WASM might rescue us!
I've at least managed to almost completely get rid of JS/SPA framework madness in the browser by going back to server rendered pages (adding reactivity where needed with datastar signals). Datastar is a breath of fresh air and might just make all SPA frameworks obsolete (just as they in turn killed jQuery).