I'm sympathetic to "it's the browser's fault", to some degree. I understand that the browser locks you into certain constraints, and I understand that I don't understand much about those constraints, because most of the extent of my experience with web development is using a canvas and a couple of fundamental APIs to render my games via WASM as web is one of my build targets (and I do know that approach is undesirable for regular web pages).

What I don't understand is why the browser is that way in the first place, and why all of the native, not-browser GUI frameworks that people use are also that way. People opt into using React Native, even.

> the browser application is usually just a frontend client that has to interact with a backend server

I will note that this is a constraint that is shared with gamedev. Most multiplayer and even many singleplayer games these days are server-based.