Who cares? (I know btw I used to be a C# engineer in my previous life - I actually first used WPF when it was still beta)

Here and now, WPF is much worse. Even Microsoft itself now invests into React Native.

> Even Microsoft itself now invests into React Native.

Microsoft invests in React Native as they want to bring applications built in React Native for iOS and Android to Windows.

The fact they are investing in React Native doesn't necessarily mean much more than the fact that they want developers to compile their React Native apps to Windows as well as the mobile platforms.

WPF hasn't had any serious investments for, what, 10 years, no?

But OP's point still stands - it is much less hacky than anything in the web ecosystem even so.

I mean, grid layout has existed in Tk (the one with the Motif look) since the earliest version I can quickly find documentation for, 8.2 from August 1999; Wikipedia tells me that 'table', apparently an early version of 'grid', was introduced in July 1993, that is to say around the time Windows NT (and with it Win32) was officially released. (And of course plain Win32 never got it, seemingly because Microsoft decided they weren’t in the business of selling toolkits despite USER being one.)

The hard idea from the programmer’s point of view is automatic layout, not grids; my impression was that Tk originated it (it certainly brought it to light), but now that I’m looking I’m not sure it wasn’t already in Motif to some extent, so the roots of the idea might go down into the primordial soup of Project Athena and similar places.