> JavaScript is an awful language
This is a bare assertion. The same thing can be (has been) said about every programming language, ever.
> the entire stack is more less broken.
This is another bare assertion.
> HTML and CSS got repurposed from document markup languages to GUI markup languages.
This is a red herring. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the evolution of markup to encompass more layout capabilities.
> We allowed this awful language to escape the browser and infiltrate our servers in form of Node.js.
Another red herring. Node.js exists. Nobody is forcing you to use it. It's being used successfully by quite a few folks. Furthermore, it was Netscape (the originators of the language) who originally introduced server-side JavaScript. SSJS has been around in various forms almost ever since there was JS.
> Microsoft also came up with the clever idea to develop desktop applications and apps with JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
They were certainly not the first. The trend started, I believe, with Mozilla's XUL architecture, evolved through things like Lazslo, and is steadily moving towards web components. This trend has been going on for a decade; even in enterprise Java land things like Struts and JSF got on the application markup bandwagon. Quite simply, markup has proven to be a good way to lay out interfaces.
> develop once, run everywhere - is far less true then many like to admit.
There are inconsistencies, true, but there is really no other stack that has achieved as much cross compatibility as the web stack.
> In the past a substantial part of development time has been spent on getting the thing to run consistently across browsers but I fear we are far from the end of the road.
This is somewhat of a "slippery slope" fallacy: 'There were problems in the past, so I fear there will be problems in the future, therefore we shouldn't solve the problems and the whole thing is crap...'. It doesn't hold together.
> Now we have more or less consistent behavior across browser for all the basic things
Which is incredibly powerful and frankly unprecedented.
> but you still regularly run into unusable web application because you happen to have an unexpected screen aspect ratio, an unsupported video codec or missing WebGL support.
Very rarely. For experimental new apps yes. But when you look at what projects like Clara.io have accomplished, they have blown away the preconceptions that the web is not suitable for things like high-end 3D graphics development.
> Unfortunately I have no good suggestion how to escape from that situation (quickly) but it seems pretty obvious to me that we have a lot of problems to solve.
Let me make a suggestion then. Contribute to solving the remaining problems instead of berating the technology, or if you manage to find a better alternative, write about that instead.