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There's a HUGE difference between "you can use HTML" and "JS all the things, because we can".

Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.

"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.

In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.

Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.

Web tech encompasses a wide berth of performance requirements depending on the stack used. React requires more overhead than Windows 95-2000 era HTML and javascript.