An interesting perspective here is this amazing 2015 blog post from the Figma co-founder: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

> "Our editor is written in C++ and cross-compiled to JavaScript using the emscripten cross-compiler... Pulling this off was really hard; we've basically ended up building a browser inside a browser."

Now sure, Figma's an exception, but it's an illustrative one. For most single-page apps, it's an interesting question. Is the web browser a monolithic platform where if you reimplement any of its layout engines etc. you're reinventing the wheel? Or, is it a set of libraries that can be chosen from at will, that of course happen to all work together to provide sane defaults, but by no means are required or expected to all be put into use simultaneously?

I tend to think of the web platform as the latter. Just because there's something in the "standard library" so-to-speak doesn't mean I'm forced to use it - the real question is whether it's something stable that won't force me and the team to yak-shave to maintain it. Mature JS/TS libraries are no worse than the browser in this regard!