I think there is a great desire for web-like application distribution to work well on smartphones, but with none of the drawbacks like poor rendering performance and lack of native features.

Of course, native apps that wrap web-based apps is almost the reverse of that, and we still often get laggy, sub-par experiences as a result of broader platform support for lower maintenance costs.

PWAs fill the opposite gap where you get native-like apps at the expense of low performance, distributed any way you like.

What we really need is for high-performance native applications to be distributable via the open web, and that's exactly what the EU is enforcing here, in a way. What would be better is for WebAssembly to take off and offer native performance in apps that can be visited at URLs, just like we're used to.