> Because your average Joe doesn't know the difference and the race to the bottom affects everyone.
Would it be possible that the average Joe is more familiar with a web stack vs a native or cross platform desktop stack?
Is it not possible that the difference therefore might be between:
- having a questionably performing app built on web technologies
- vs a buggy one that's built on a native/cross-platform stack, or even not having one altogether because they can't build with that tech
as opposed to:
- having a questionably performing app built on web technologies
- having an awesome native/cross-platform app that runs better and respects the OS design
Or, who knows, maybe it's just cheaper to use web tech and those other options have failed to make themselves as easy to get started with and work on, especially when you're looking for good cross platform options that would run nearly everywhere and be popular enough to have tooling and tutorials.
It's the same how something like Rust might be a good fit for writing correct web applications, but very few people actually use it for that and might instead reach for something like Python because that lets them iterate faster, even if neither the type system, nor the performance is great.
Actually, who knows, maybe the problem is not that there's not enough "good software" out there, but rather that different people have wildly different views on what matters, in addition to there just being too much software in general.
> Your notion that browser-based apps are somehow bug-free is absurd.
My notion is that more people are familiar with using the web stack, than any other alternative.
Out of curiosity, I perused some local job boards: out of about 50 technical role ads that I looked through, 4 were embedded or desktop development, there were some DevOps and ML related roles in the middle, but the majority were web development.
If that's the set of technologies and the languages that people are familiar with (high abstraction level, no manual memory management), then attempting to use these "performant" options obviously wouldn't turn out well, due to a lack of skill, familiarity and/or user experience of that tooling.
I mean, in an ideal world, GUI software would be even easier to create than using Lazarus was back in the day (the RAD approach), but sadly the greatness that was lcl is mostly lost to time because nobody cares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library
> Using tools not made for the job yields crappy results, who would have known.
Depends on what the goals are. If they are to take people from the job market that currently exists (lots of webdevs) and build software that is good enough and ship it to earn $$$, then clearly they've succeeded, no matter how much people complain about the inefficiencies or how suboptimal the tools might be considered.
