[youessayyyaway]

Browsers are fantastic cross-platform UI frameworks. Writing a local page is a great way to start prototyping. The problem is that they are very slow and resource-hungry. All those dynamic styling and DOM niceties come with a significant cost.

WASM can help, but the webdev ecosystem encourages developers to use fat JS libraries for most tasks.

Your browser prototype will probably start to chug once it grows to the point that it needs to juggle >1000s of objects. Native apps have the potential to be much more efficient and responsive.

They also tend to work better and more consistently on older/cheaper hardware. I think that every website developer should use a $200 Chromebook for development at least a few weeks out of the year. Most of the world is not using a new M2 macbook, and it's easy to lose sight of that when you spend your time working on new features.