That reads quite differently from your statement. The limits imposed by app stores are real challenges that keep people from building apps. That’s a very logical reason to avoid it. It seems your original statement would be better phrased, “There is no logical reason why there should be so many boundaries preventing everyone from having an app.”

But even then, it ignores the technical hurdles an individual or organization must leap to build an app. Languages and ecosystems to learn, full of idiosyncrasies and best practices. Complexities of deployment pipelines, seeking incompatibilities between devices. I’ve worked with Android before and lemme tell you, I’ll move to a different industry before I do that again. (Kotlin is wonderful, at least!)

Compared to web, where you pick the browsers you want to support and it works. Where there is constant warfare between vendors to improve performance and get closer to the native experience. Where you have a massive pool of talent and a low barrier to entry. How is this even close?

Obviously they're arguing from a pragmatic point of view, as opposed to one in which we (some) software engineers somehow control reality and successfully impose that's ideal to them.