I'm coming from a "end-result"-driven opinion about making something that works. It was a huge hurdle just to do pretty much anything beyond display text documents, so that was my problem when building web apps.
As to you your last point - yes true, but I think it's much worse with non-web technology and native apps!
> It was a huge hurdle just to do pretty much anything beyond display text documents
Like what?
The trend I see in practice is that most web applications are still 98% text documents with images, but a combination of modern design patterns and tooling makes generating those documents insanely complicated.
Currently I'm watching a project to "modernize" a bunch of small websites. The amount of effort it takes to convert them to some "familiar" (Bootstrap-like) UI is cringe-worthy.
As to you your last point - yes true, but I think it's much worse with non-web technology and native apps!