Email has in some ways sat around in the gutter but media reasons are not why. The protocols are insanely complex and archaic and you need about 20 bits of software to actually run an email server. And then its all completely insecure because email was never built with end to end crypto.
imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.
In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable".
Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.