If that's the case, then why does nearly every company have a native app in addition to their website? Surely, they could save a lot of time and money by just not building and maintaining the app.
Web apps will always on paper be slower (not including badly made applications on both) than native apps, and also bring in additional security issues (since code is loaded remotely) than native applications.
apps built using the webview don't necessarily have to be loaded remotely. If you're building with capacitor, then nothing happens remotely until you choose.
The funny part is that it’s actually not a pain in the ass to distribute. On iOS, saving the current link to the homescreeen installs the PWA (if available). You don’t have to do anything other than tap a button in the share menu. iOS treats it like an app, showing it in the app switcher and search, etc.
People just don’t know it’s an option. And as you say, there are fewer native APIs available to it.
Native apps make more money, because of phone data. A lot of effort is now put into facilitating cross-platform builds, a wrapper/container around a glorified web app is among the easiest ways
MacOS is getting there kind of lately with safari being able to turn web pages into apps. But there isn't really built in mechanisms for that: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/14/how-web-apps-work-macos...