All those were used for tiny of functionality in browsers and did not even remotely approach the performance and functionality of the real desktop applications.
This makes no sense. I do not recall the amount of RAM I had on my 486DX50 but whatever version of office it had at the time ran just fine. JavaScript was not even born by then. But when first ever versions of JavaScript were released their execution speed were molasses comparatively to native applications. I know it first hand as I was developing native and web and in browser applications since 94 even before JavaScript (I used Netscape's server push functionality for that). When Java was released and until it matured to decent enough JIT it was the same slow resource hog (again know it first hand).
I do not quite understand what you're trying to say here. Many are / were not wealthy to buy any computer at all back then. I was born long before 486.
Worse, we even had interpreted Java applets, with the JIT a couple of years in the future to come.