BUT, Fundamentally...
>The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page.
Is just not a true statement. Or rather, the web sucks, but it is the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level.
Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. They only care that it works on their platform. As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc.
The only people who should be upset about cross-platform compatibility issues are budget-conscious managers and unfortunate OSS devs.
I've heard that some users have both a phone and a laptop.
This is like saying "As construction workers we should be cheering for natural disasters, because there will be more work for construction workers to rebuild destroyed cities."
Job security is great- but at what cost? I'd rather see developers making completely new things than wasting time porting from one native platform to another.
And for the record, doing a port well (as opposed to a hacky, broken one) frequently requires lots of creativity and technical ingenuity.
UI is not always about respecting the OS's guidelines/theme. Firefox, for example pretty much ignores everything since their Australis UI update and it is fine.
Beyond that is the fact that Swing was fugly everywhere, and bootstrap looks decent everywhere.
I just argued against the parent poster, who said Java was different than browsers, because you could not make native UI.
Which you actually can very easily.