What would be the right tool for an entertaining highly interactive and animated (game-like, but still mostly text based) thing then? Used to be Java applets and Flash. Now is "webapps" and WebGL.

Or is that it should have been handrolled using CSS animations and framework-less JS?

Or is it more that we're acting like it's 1995 and the web is for reading text documents only, and anything other than that is nerd blasphemy? (Not saying you're saying this, but it is something some still say; they hate the web stack being used in other ways).