Right, he's basically saying that he wants the browser to behave identically to the desktop, where all logic is executed locally and direct connections are made

Right, he's basically saying that he wants the browser to behave identically to the desktop, where all logic is executed locally and direct connections are made out to external databases for storage. I assume this is because he's a language hipster and resents ever having to look at something that's not JavaScript. There are multiple reasons that people stopped shipping big blobs with application logic and now rely on backend servers, but database servers having "failed the web" are not among them.