I have a hotter take, that the spec and implementations were rushed and it makes it hard to push past "toy" quality for web apps. I have seen people struggle and wind up moving mountains to get what is basic functionality and performance in native audio apps.

The other thing is that they have made cardinal sins like relying on direct form biquads for basic filters and using an array for parameters. It's good enough to make a demo but falls apart in the situations that you actually care about, and these are things that the pro audio industry (or similar, like gaming) have had solved for a very long time (*)

* pro audio software is a disaster, but for other reasons