I personally think it’s due to how the internet is designed, where applications are an afterthought. It’s after all easy to just get html pages published online

I personally think it’s due to how the internet is designed, where applications are an afterthought. It’s after all easy to just get html pages published online, but anything beyond that is a hack. With a better protocol and set of primitives it shouldn’t be as complicated (even though the challenges of scale can be unique to server software)