There is no serious alternative for the purely editorial stuff but still lots of room for improvement.

For the application-like stuff… there was some good and some bad in Java applets, Flex, and Silverlight but none of that had a barrier as low as HTML/CSS/JS.

I think the way forward is for HTML and the DOM is to adopt ideas from the framework space (like one/two-way binding) and expose more high-level UI elements out of the box.

Just imagine something like:

    <script>
    const myDataTable = new DataTable()
    myDataTable.head = ["Foo", "Bar", "Baz"]
    myDataTable.items = [[1, 2, 3],[4, 5, 6]]
    </script>
    <table binding="myDataTable" class="my-data-table" sortable />

with everything needed built into the platform, and no hard need for any third-party framework.