Programming for the web makes me feel like I’m back in the 90s, no even Java/Swing was easier. I get making the sacrifice if it means I can run in the browser, but not otherwise.
I have fond memories of debugging C# with Msft tools, but I also suffered a decent amount on the debugging cycle in C/C++. Being able to just patch in some new code without going through a whole compile/set up the environment again is very useful.
I can understand thinking that the foundation of the web is bad, therefore web development is bad. But I would take the chrome debugger experience over C/PHP/Java debugging experience most days of the week.
(That being said, I could simply be unaware of some debugging tools in that space that make things nicer)
Doing UI in C/C++ sucks, but that was also true in the 90s.
Chrome is a horrible debugger from a UI design perspective. Debugging through VSCode is better, but I still miss simple things like auto toString displays. Surely the tools could get much better, that they haven’t is depressing.
To my knowledge, almost no native UI libraries have good support for CSS-style selectors. Being able to write out selection rules like "odd elements in this kind of list of elements" is extremely useful.
This is going to sound silly, but almost no native UI toolkit has a good "screenshots" section on its website. Meanwhile you go over to Bootstrap and you see stuff you actually recognize. This is important! It proves that you can actually make nice looking things.
Stuff like interface designers shipped by MSFT are pretty great though.