I’d be hard pressed to find something more considered or with more detail than this essay, which stands as an editorial reflection of the state of the web alongside a detailed and comprehensive account of about a decade of web history.
These were two very different approaches towards creating dynamic web-based user interfaces, and they were as good as invented simultaneously. Their launch as public projects also happened at pretty much the same time with Google’s first attempt to standardise Web Components and Facebook’s first launch of React as an open source project both happening in 2013. This was, in my personal opinion, the point where multiple schisms in web development began to happen, the break that has hindered web developer discourse since
We need web apps. Web apps are the only open and standardised GUI software development and distribution platform that’s available to us. Discarding them out of spite or annoyance is exactly the sort of situation that the phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” was coined for.
