[nineteen999]

People want "one big program" that can do everything on the web. Doesn't matter that it's a stupid idea. We still want it.

[sylware]

They never have wanted that, they were forced into that, it was decided for them by big tech.

That said, you perfectly can have a big program, actually one window with tabs (chromebooks), handling various network protocols (URLs are nice, irc:// etc), or system interaction.