[int_19h]

You don't need a web browser to edit text. As evidenced by dozens of excellent text editors that are not built on web browsers.

It's just easier to take a web browser that already has something approximating a text editor, and pile things on top of that.

And why is that? Well, because you want to support all the different platforms, and we as an industry have absolutely screwed up the portability story, and so we build it as hacks instead. There's absolutely no reason why developing a GUI app for macOS should be radically different from developing a GUI app for Windows or Linux - they all ultimately do the same thing. There's no sensible reason for them to be different. But they are. And so now the easiest way to solve that problem is to pile the browser on top, and forget that the differences exist. Of course, it doesn't actually solve the problem in general, because the differences are still there, and the industry as a whole still pays the overhead tax, in both man-hours of work someone has to spend maintaining that flimsy stack of abstractions, and in runtime performance tax those abstractions impose.

But the only way to fix it is to burn the whole thing to the ground. And that's not happening, because the short-term cost is too large to even contemplate any long-term gains.