> all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way.

Except they had been solved in other ways and the problem was people insisted on using web technologies to emulate those other technologies even when web technologies didn’t support the same primitives. And they chose that path because it was cheaper than using the correct technologies from the outset. And thus a thousand hacks were invented because it’s cheaper than doing things properly.

Then along comes Electron, React Native and so on and so forth. And our hacks continue to proliferate, memory usage be damned.

> And they chose that path because it was cheaper than using the correct technologies from the outset

No, otherwise they would not need all those hacks. Web stack makes it cheap (fast and easy) to build an MVP, but since the very primitives required to fully implement requirements are not even there, they end up implementing tons of ugly hacks held by duck tape. All because they thought they could iterate fast and cheap.

It's the same story with teams picking any highly dynamic language for an MVP and then implementing half-baked typing on top of it when the project gets out of MVP stage. Otherwise the bug reproduction rate outpaces fixing rate.

Having done native and web frontends, they are different.

I prefer the capabilities of native frameworks but I prefer the web box model.

Sizing stuff is native frameworks is nice until it isn’t.