The reason it's so hard to come up with a feasible alternative at this point is that we have done ~15 years of browser wars with perhaps an average of 3k "core"

The reason it's so hard to come up with a feasible alternative at this point is that we have done ~15 years of browser wars with perhaps an average of 3k "core" contributors (browser company employees etc) since "we" moved into this direction... pretty much by chance. My understanding from working at Opera at the time (2004 and onwards) is that the "senior" (experienced) people were busy implementing stuff in the browser engines and various GUI platforms. We hired very young (often like 17-18) and very smart people who had experience actually writing HTML/CSS/JS to work on developing web standards. They naturally typically had very little commercial software development experience. After a while it kinda became a competition - which browser company's web standards people would be leading in terms of ideas/innovations. How many web APIs could browser company A do, vs browser company B. That's when the complexity really started accelerating. Then Safari and Chrome happened. I wish we had spent more time working with these web standards people (we had so much experience building GUIs, for instance). They were really friendly and approachable, but we were all so busy with actually building the browsers, during these browser war times. It feels like a missed opportunity, in retrospect.