Look at it from the opposite perspective though: "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere."
"Because that's not the way I want to develop" is not a good enough reason to increase complexity, security footprint, and unintended side effects.
That's cheeky. "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere."
I think the point is rather that single-codebase "productivity apps" that satisfy basic modern experience expectations (like "I could run it offline") are not possible elsewhere - but they should be. And they would be, if some browser vendors cared about the web more than their walled garden.
Also, the thing about expanding the Open Web Platform is that the new features that are available to me don't take anything away from you if you don't want to use them. Keep making static sites if that's what suits your purpose and don't register any ServiceWorkers or any other things you consider "bloat". (As an aside - As fashionable as it has become to moan about Web "bloat" let's strive to remember that the Web standards are debated and governed by committees of consummate experts mostly in the open.) If we expand the Web platform we can both develop "the way we want" (assuming you want to keep doing things the way you have and I want to use new features).
It was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was trying to show that there's two sides to this: developers and consumers.
Developing for a single platform and being able to run everywhere is great. I'm not sure what your "not possible elsewhere" is referring to, though. Java is one example of a language that's possible to deploy pretty much everywhere. Or do you mean natively in a browser?
While it's true that as a developer I'm free to use or not use any newly-introduced features and standards, as a consumer I don't have that choice. I either continue to use the sites and services I did before they changed everything, or I have to find an alternative which may not exist. Remember all the sites that required flash to run? That's what I want to avoid with responsive web apps.
"I think the point is rather that single-codebase "productivity apps" that satisfy basic modern experience expectations (like "I could run it offline") are not possible elsewhere - but they should be."
Why?
"Also, the thing about expanding the Open Web Platform is that the new features that are available to me don't take anything away from you if you don't want to use them. "
As a user, they do. If you go whole hog on the PWA stuff, then I no longer have the regular website you used to have.
"Because that's not the way I want to develop" is not a good enough reason to increase complexity, security footprint, and unintended side effects.