@freakazoid Regarding JS misuse... this ties into a number of other things, but that particular issue is actually almost entirely disconnected from the reason proprietary apps appeared on the web.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time understanding why there's so much JS misuse, and while there are various factors affecting it, there's been one central factor: developers are learning how to use the tools wrong.

There are very few 'known good' educational resources for web development, instead expecting people to cobble together their own learning experience.

The result is that a lot of developers - especially those who are getting into tech because "everyone should learn to code and it pays well" (as tech companies have been advertising to dilute the labour pool) - default to learning from tech companies, being the de facto authorities in the field from a beginner perspective.

These massive tech companies tend to put out breathless blogposts about whatever the newest "web at scale" hype is, because that's what *they* are doing and well, it's a good pitch to look like a modern place to work. The appeal of "not having to deal with legacy stuff" is large, especially for beginner devs.

So in practice, almost everybody either learns from resources by big tech companies - which optimize for hype and looking 'ahead of the curve', as well as 'training developers to work with their stack for cheaper hiring - or from resources which have been *derived from* those big tech resources.

MDN technically exists, but as I've complained about many times before, their materials are so inaccessible in many ways that almost nobody I've pointed at it has actually been interested in reading it.

There's now a massive amount of developers whose whole conception of "web development" consists almost exclusively of this hype blog output, often legitimately not *knowing* about any other way to do it.

(I have had to explain how forms without JS work *so many* times by now, to people who have been doing webdev for years...)

For obvious reasons, none of the tech companies really have any reason to do anything about this problem.

TL;DR: There's a massive education problem that is self-sustaining by this point because those people then write new materials with the same errors in them. And they will take these beliefs with them to any new platform.

(Aside, Flash used to be Macromedia; Shockwave was another product of theirs.)

I am likewise concerned by the situation with WASM, and I'm seeing a very similar albeit disconnected situation playing out there; a lot of people who have only ever learned a really specific (terrible) way of writing JS see it as a way to "get rid of JS because it sucks", and it's *extremely* difficult IME to convey that JS can be a lot better if you change the way you approach it. But this again has a bunch of other factors influencing it too (spec scope creep, etc.)

Overall, all of these situations are just extremely messy, and a variety of factors have played a role in getting to this point, and none of those factors can just be wished away, unfortunately. Capitalist incentives, hype cycles, self-perpetuating education problems... no new platform will fix any of these, we're actually going to have to do the Hard Work