On the other hand, if you use the right development methodologies such as unit testing, MVC, MVP, MVVM, and/or frameworks that translate statically typed or functional code to JS, the write-build-run-debug cycle is not an issue, because in general it only becomes an issue with a wrong approach to programming. This is totally the same as in non-web-programming.
And HTML trundled along unwanted in WHATWG through those times, scorned, rejected as inadequate and not suitable. And yet, XHTML2 got closed down, everyone switched back to the HTML path.
And processes involving changing web development from an environment to an output format - Google's GWT and Dart, don't seem to have gained much traction.
I don't know what happened to Xanadu, either.
You probably should dig into the history of Rich Internet Applications (formerly XUL, before Mozilla decided to stamp out the naming confusion with their own XML vocabulary), in the days before Ajax really stabilised and things drifted back into the browser.
In an ideal world, now that the web has shifted from being a bunch of linked documents to complex applications, we'd have a development stack aimed at developing applications, with sane means of specifying UI layout and behaviour, low overhead client-server comm protocols etc.