[DevKoala]

Because of browser support honestly.

Outside of grid-layout, there is nothing salvageable from the CSS layout engine that cannot be done better inside a programmable view such a canvas.

Give it 5 years or so for WebGL/WebGPU to standardize, and new UI libraries with a better layout engine and UI constructs far better than what can be built on top of HTML/CSS will show up.

Nobody thought we would take HTML/CSS as far as we have, but it has already served its purpose.

Your comment reminds me of this article back then: https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web

[antjanus]

I think what we'll see in 5 years will be browsers using even more hardware acceleration/GPU acceleration for its rendering -- so it'll be entirely abstracted away from us. Obviously, direct canvas rendering will still be more performant.

[DevKoala]

I don't think anything will stop browser vendors from advancing the HTML/CSS standards, but I also believe that we will see the emergence of libraries that have a different opinion around layout declarations and core components. These libraries will benefit from browser vendors opening up the GPU with each new iteration.