It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.

The flip side of that equation is that poor practical choices never improve because there will only be more platforms to target.

If we made development decisions based on technological constraints alone, how is it supposed to improve?

Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc.

I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser.

And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.