Hey the email services has just proved you could offer better than Gmail experience with HTML + small dose of JS. Another example being the new FE on Github.

At the end of the day it isn't really the tech that is the problem. Is how people use the tech. And for thousands of different reasons keeping it simple has always provided better experience evaluated on the whole.

> Another example being the new FE on Github.

Github's old frontend was mostly HTML with a bit of JS, their new frontend is react. The old UI had its bugs, but it was much better than the react version in my experience. I still commonly find the UI out of sync with itself requiring a reload, but now I also frequently wait for the page to load and viewing large diff's is a performance nightmare.