Here’s my suggestion: make a base browser support wasm, canvas (or something like webgpu, I’m not sure) and APIs, unavailable from sandbox. And then build JS engine, HTML, CSS, etc on top of this base platform. Now all the complexity is encapsulated and can actually be replaced by a particular website. Web apps can avoid this complexity. Web sites will just `import html from google-chrome` or something like that.

The point is that base browser should be simple enough to be implemented by a single developer. And all those complex standards are just libraries, like Angular.

Except that corporations join standard bodies to exert influence in their favor. If a standard is easy to implement then there would be more competition. E.g. Microsoft pushed standardization of their Open Office XML format. A party critical of their standard printed out the two competing specifications. ODF sat on the table and OOXML sat on the floor. My memory is hazy but I think the OOXML stack was still taller than the ODF stack.

Oh yay a new standard! https://xkcd.com/927/