By that I mean that we should have moved cleanly beyond that by now with no regrets. Certainly it comes from my time in the '80s and '90s developing "desktop"

By that I mean that we should have moved cleanly beyond that by now with no regrets. Certainly it comes from my time in the '80s and '90s developing "desktop" software (of course we didn't call it that)on Unix and Windows. There were user interface objects that had behaviour. Once we "got" that HTML and JavaScript could do similar, we make the browser into the new windowing system. But unlike the Windows and Unix desktops of old, which had "official" SDKs and libraries, it was the wild west. Fifteen years later it still is. If fifteen years ago you had said that one starts a new project by running a command-line script that would clutter your project with hundreds or thousands of tiny source files from sources unknown, we would have laughed at the absurdity.