I've often thought about this. People nowadays build their websites predominantly on React component kits which resemble more sophisticated HTML elements. If HTML were extended to include that more sophisticated functionality -- and come on, it's been 20 years and people are certainly sufficiently aligned on this approach to now include it in the spec -- then I wonder whether JavaScript would be necessary, or at least as necessary as it is now.

I think either direction would be interesting. Or both. The browser was an experiment in the first place, but people seem to have stopped experimenting and are just doing the equivalent of what building on an IBM mainframe would have been in those days. It's disappointing. (It's not unlike people who quote Martin Luther King today, not appreciating that the essence of his radicalism was the direction of travel towards justice, not the political compromises themselves which are now firmly established.)

I hope at least that the renewed interest in systems programming that's come with the Rust fandom might spur some actually innovative developments to replace the antiquated model we're all stuck using. But sadly the tech community seems to be split into two communities, one of which has no interest in innovating, and the other of which seems to be set on innovations so absurdly impractical (¡world wide web on the blockchain!) that they could never take off.