Once these practices become sufficiently spread, the majority of developers and content producers will never understand that an alternative is possible.
Or maybe he will need it: those same developers can perfectly be contractors for a government agency whose site the user has to access.
Trends slowly creep everywhere, independently on technical merit.
It's mostly radio buttons (with a loading screen and a pile of js/css to make it pretty of course.) You fill it out, click submit and a matching suit gets shipped to your house. I couldn't get some of the controls to work and sent the support people an email. It turns out the form they built uses some special chrome only API and doesn't work in Firefox.
Ditto when I submitted my rental application for my current apartment (how can you screw up a single page with a file form that badly?)
The trends are definitely going the wrong way.
history repeats itself (or more exactly we humans repeatedly step upon the same pile of stuff) Back then it was IE only APIs. Those APIs of course were for better and richer functionality and user experience. And we all know how it ended.
I choose Dillo or Netsurf. Now how can I still use sites it can't even render because the developers have drunk the Google-aid and used some trendy framework that requires the latest version of Chrome and JS just to display some static text and images?
Fuck Google and its creeping control over the Internet.