Application development for browsers is, in a way, a stack of huge hacks on the top of huge hacks. Developers are using HTML and CSS for purposes they were never intended (e.g. a WYSIWYG word processor), and doing some really gnarly hacks to make it all work.
Those gnarly hacks required to make their applications work prejudice web application developers against HTML and CSS, since they don't work worth a damned for those developers.
But HTML and CSS work remarkably well for what they were designed for: Documents.
Applications have, historically, usually been distributed in a different format than documents. Perhaps they should resume that trend; targeting the browser just being the OS, and leaving the document standards for documents.
My knee jerk response to the original article was, "this is making the web less free," but a bit of thought raises the question, "I can't interact this way with Microsoft Word, so why do I expect to interact this way with Google Docs?"
- WebAssembly + Canvas rendering is bad because it turns the web into a bunch of opaque blobs and removes user freedoms and abilities
- The web should only be for documents, not applications
- So it follows that... all the applications which are currently "open" websites should be opaque native app executables where you can't have extensions or adblockers or anything?
To be clear, I agree with the first point. Websites moving to opaquely rendered canvases is terrible. They should remain "normal" DOM/HTML.