[M95D]

> I can ship a cross-platform application

And you can also un-ship it whenever you want, leaving users with unusable devices they paid money for.

[circuit10]

You can ship an offline, standalone HTML file you can open in your browser too (this might not happen often but my point is it's not inherent to the technology)

[542458]

That was always the case. Lots of “flasher” applications have had web dependencies where they’d download the latest firmware to a temp directory before flashing.