Finding it hard to take such wildly idealistic comments seriously.

There's a ton of stuff that will stop you from making your own browser. The distinction here is that nobody is stopping you to BEGIN making your own browser, but dozens of factors will stop you from making it WIDELY VIABLE later -- which you need if you want anybody else but you to use it.

I think you got hung up on "forced". Obviously nobody is saying that pistols put at somebody's forehead were involved. But IE6 and "This browser is not supported" was a thing back then, and that made people compromise a lot and appeal to early JS stupidities.

Then it snowballed and the rest is history.

Speaking of which, it took CSS ages until its devs finally woke up and started adding native animations and transitions for which JS was required. So you were "forced" using JS for those for quite a long time as well.

Don't argue linguistics, please. I'm very sure you knew exactly what I was talking about.