The point is that the lack of businesses being made responsible for the externalities they cause disincentives native apps, not that it is impossible.

If 90% of apps necessary for normal life are only available as poor web versions it drives obsolescence no matter what the remaining 10% do.

Why is web app a bad thing though? Most of the apps do not require much performance and the web version can also be pretty fast, at least sufficient for users. I think the same author writing that crappy web app will produce worse native apps if forced to do so.

Web apps is better than native as they are automatically running the latest version, platform independent (windows, mac, linux, android, ios), in some sense more secure. Instead of asking people to write more native apps, I think we should rather ask them to write more quality web apps if they don't need native capabilities.

I started writing yet another rant about how most HN users don't care about the rest of the planet, but then thought better of it. Long story short: way more people on Earth are using cheap (and thus low-power) hardware then you probably think. And it isn't necessarily old.

Try running eg. Libre Office and gdocs on a 10+ year old laptop. The difference is night and day. And that is a web app which should not be particularly demanding (essentially text entry).

No, google docs is not just text entry, it is much more complicated than that due to synchronization and they did not try to optimize it well IMO. Text entry, even with highlighting and rich text, can be fast with web app, see VSCode and markdown applications for example.

As an example, see Atom vs VSCode. We thought building a code editor with electron will lead to something slow like Atom, but m$ later proved that it is possible to build something fast. Perhaps not as simple as native, but it can be done.