Shitty web design is shitty web design. Google and Mozilla themselves didn't make the Smithsonian Magazine site a bloated monstrosity, nor can I think of a reasonable way for a browser to prevent sites from sucking without ruining the "non-geek" user experience on better-behaved dynamic sites and web apps.
Anything not supported by HTML or CSS directly will inevitably be implemented in Javascript. We've already been there.
Unwanted popups still happen. Cross-site-scripting attacks are still a thing. Canvas fingerprinting is still a thing, albeit a newer one. Sites I visit can still track me across other properties unless I jump through a number of hoops. Content creators are still largely not being compensated for their work. Half the sites I visit are practically unreadable for me, and my eyesight is pretty damn good.
The big companies like Google or Apple could have stopped a few of these races to the bottom in their tracks--just like Jobs did to Flash--but they haven't, for, umm, reasons...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170706120427/https://www.tedun...
Point being that the "empire" does not give a hoot about meaning. Their priorities lie elsewhere.
edit: Example. One day Steve Jobs just felt like flash didn't belong on his platform. At the time, flash was everywhere. Where is it now? I'm not shedding a tear for it--just using it as example of what a top-down enterprise the web actually is compared to what some people would like to think.