[everforward]

That's a valid concern.

I think there could be middle-ground approaches, we just don't have them right now. E.g. React is basically entirely interpreted; we could create something like React that used a different set of primitives than the DOM. Browser extensions could act as middleware between React and those new primitives, as a plugin to the execution engine similar to how they currently work. Someone smarter than me probably has a better idea of how that would be implemented, but it seems possible.

A lot of webpages I see aren't even really documents anymore. They serve a very basic HTML page and use JS to flesh out the rest. It's not all that conceptually different from Qt to me, except that there's a standards-enforced way to serialize the objects out into text. We could create a middle-ground engine that used simple primitives and could be serialized out into a text format. Qt kind of does that QtCreator, from what I know. I believe it creates XML docs that specify the objects to create.