Right, and now that we've spent a full decade exploring that route together we should be in a great position to step back and ask ourselves if it turned out to be a good decision.
There is nothing inherent to the internet or the promises thereof that require the kinds of interactivity that have driven the tidal wave of front end scripting that has flooded the space. The overwhelming majority of it comes down to designers being cute for no obvious reason and business entities that aggressively abuse their client's browsers and bandwidth solely because cross-browser compatibility is notionally cheaper than maintaining software across several operating systems. The rest is monkey see monkey do.