It's just sad that you even have to have that in your checklist of things nowadays. Like it's amazing when software doesn't ask you to make another damned online account and just lets you use it. (And it's good that this doesn't, yay.)
Hosted is a negative feature to me (other than for trying the software). You don't control the software installation.
Tomorrow you could wake up and try to continue your work, to discover that some feature is missing you were depending on, or new bugs are happening that weren't there and so on. Or your local storage is borked because it's not being read correctly by the newly installed code.
It's good if something is hosted for trying out, but you want it to be locally installable so you and your team can depend on it, and evaluate updates before rolling them out, and roll back bad updates.
"Has local storage" is another thing that is sad to see as having to tick off a checklist.
You insert the CD, install the software, and then it's ready to use. That's it.
To reiterate the quote from the article the GP mentioned:
> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.
Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear product because of its purposeful feature set and look / feel, but name something from back then.