My man, I am not a fossil. I came of age with web apps. But I am someone who has seen both sides. I have worked professionally on both desktop applications and as a full stack web developer, and my informed takeaway is web apps are insane. Web dev is a nightmarish tower of complexity that is antithetical to good engineering practice, and you should only do it if you are working in a problem space that is well and truly web-native.
I try to live by KISS, and nontrivial web apps are not simple. A couple of things to consider:
1. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, why should I instead do that task with a web app that does everything in a distributed fashion? Unnecessary distributed computing is insane.
2. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, and as a single application, not client-server, why should I accept the overhead of running it in a browser? Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React. But actually, React is also too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with Next.js. That's right, we've got frameworks inside of frameworks now. So that's OS -> GUI library -> browser -> framework -> framework framework -> application.
3. The world desperately needs to reduce its energy consumption to reduce the impact of climate change. If we can make more applications local and turn off a few servers, we should.
I am not an old man yelling at the cloud. I am a software engineer who cares deeply about efficient, reliable software, and I am begging, pleading for people to step back for a second and consider whether a simpler mode of application development is sufficient for their needs.
