Some of us still remember the golden years of doing the same but with jQuery snippets spread through hundreds of files with zero logical connection between them except in the developer's mind.
I have no issues with frameworks and libs but the fact I know I’m on site built with react because everything gets laggy and my laptops fans start spinning is not a great selling point.
Yes, the web is a terrible platform for applications. Anything on the web that goes beyond the equivalent of linked PDFs will be wonky.
There's nothing on the web even approaching 1990s desktop applications. Specially if you care about latency, precision, and text inputs not randomly eating what you type.
Even with the wonkiness, the web is usually worth using because of the access you get to big amounts of data and backend servers providing nice services.