As a moderately seasoned developer, I've seen this in my friends too (you know who you are). They get excited by the latest and greatest technology (which is great and they should) and they apply it to their business without first asking themselves if it's actually beneficial (which is bad and they shouldn't).
Most of them come around to "build it simple at first and optimize later", or YAGNI, but in the mean time, we get things like The Next Web.
$5 TNW's next iteration is plain HTML and simple CSS with a minimal amount of JS and they make a big thing out of how performant their site is now, loading instantly, etc. Good job, you discovered Web 1.0 again, but this time with better designers.
> TNW's next iteration … loading instantly
Games aren't a fair comparison; very few sites are anything like games, and gaming has always been pushing the boundaries of technology.
A more favourable comparison would be shipping a "content reader app", based on Windows Metro APIs, when a plaintext file would do just fine (and would work on MSDOS 1.0, if it were ASCII).
The trend today is that sites are crashing my up-to-date Firefox browser[1] because they need a ton of Javascript to get the layout right.
I don't mind a fancy site but just let me get the information I need.
[1] I own a not so new smart phone that does the job well for everything else.
-posted using Opera Mini
It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.
Or you can have them click the download Chrome/Firefox link.