I've built native ui applications under win32 (API itself, MFC, ATL), os/2, x11, qt, gtk and more. Developing UI for each of these was a thing I found much more

I've built native ui applications under win32 (API itself, MFC, ATL), os/2, x11, qt, gtk and more. Developing UI for each of these was a thing I found much more straightforward than web applications over the last decade. The initial learning curve was higher, but once you had that knowledge it remained correct and relevant for years- sometimes decades. And your application UX was faster and smoother. The minor lag between user interaction and UI action that we take as a given today in all but the most basic applications simply didn't exist if you wrote your UI to conform with the platform guidelines. Even poor performing complex UIs typically did better than today's well written complex UIs - on hardware quite a bit less capable. We've accepted he current hodgepodge because of portability, but if you've ever worked with the base platforms for any length of time , the difference is painfully clear. This doesn't touch on how you could expect a consistent ui experience across all applications on an entire platform. It's hard to get that across even two web sites. We are currently well into a full generation of developers and consumers who are unaware of what's being lost, because most of their interactions are with browser base applications and mobile phones. Waiting a few dozen to a few hundred extra ms for ui to respond is considered normal, if it's noticed at all.