> The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.

This feels like the root cause to me as well. Or more specifically, the web does have idioms, the problem is that those idioms are still stuck in 1980 and assume the web is a collection of science papers with hyperlinks and the occasional image, data table and submittable form.

This is where the "favourites" list and the ability to select any text on a web pages came from.

Web apps not only have to build an application UI completely from scratch, they also have to do it on top of a document UI that "wants" to do something completely different.

Modern browsers have toned down those idioms and essentially made it "easier to fight them", but didn't remove or improve them.

"The Web" has evolved into a pretty bad UI API. I kind of wish that the web stuck to documents with hyperlinks, and something else emerged as a cross-platform application SDK. Combining them both into HTTP/CSS/JS was a mistake IMO.