I have to agree with you. Maybe especially as someone coming from using flutter exclusively for app development. Someone joked about this at work "wait, so flutter 1 did not enable developers to create beautiful, fast and portable apps for any platform?"
I had a vague idea that flutter 1 had a desktop/server like backing so that it could be used to develop desktop apps. Maybe this was incorrect, and only possible now with flutter 2? I'm still confused. This app: https://rive.app/ was made using flutter 1, no? It runs in the browser, so maybe this is the key difference with flutter 2, that... it allows native apps?
I had a vague idea that flutter 1 had a desktop/server like backing so that it could be used to develop desktop apps. Maybe this was incorrect, and only possible now with flutter 2? I'm still confused. This app: https://rive.app/ was made using flutter 1, no? It runs in the browser, so maybe this is the key difference with flutter 2, that... it allows native apps?