[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.

Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.

The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.

Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.