The point is, web is everywhere and nobody has to explicitly install anything to use a website - especially important for the less techy people that have no clu

The point is, web is everywhere and nobody has to explicitly install anything to use a website - especially important for the less techy people that have no clue about "6 MMU wait states". So the browser is absolutely the right platform to build a (rich) text editor e.g. as a component of a web app. Is it an easy task? No, not really. We still have a half dead IE, Safari and the other browsers are far from perfect. Is that efficient? No. There is a ton of cruft and perhaps the best thing is to draw into a canvas and just not use most of it all (for better performance in the end). So you are basically pushing pixels from JavaScript (ok, or WebAssembly) in the end, if you want the best performance. Then you reimplement all the work that was already done at least 3 times before by OS, Browser and some library/ toolkit/ framework authors. You have to reimplement e.g translation using your own dictionaries, because you cannot easily work with the translator of the browser or the operating system (that's why browsers bring their own). You write a least a slightly different CSS for every browser family. You handle stuff like Content Security Policy differently. This is like every second thing, that you have to reimplement or make platform specific adjustments to make it work somewhat well. That's totally insane. In all this, absolute performance is just really hard to achieve. Do you expect people to ship apps for like 5 different platforms using perhaps 4 considerably different tech stacks or using 1 but then still adjusting for each platform again/ hacking it to look native and not get banned by an app store? The problem is, people don't take responsibility for their work and almost nobody simplifies stuff. Stuff just somehow works but most of it just isn't solid or it isn't compatible or it is extremely (over)complicated. The next guy using it as a dependency has all these problems on top of the problems of his or her own with the problem at hand. This tree is multiple levels deep. Your pyramid is built on stuff that hundreds of smart engineers basically overlooked/ ignored for decades. Meltdown and friends is just one example, there are HW bugs, there are management engines, there is the OS, the libraries, other software/ daemons/ services, bad APIs, old APIs, deprecated APIs, functionality split between old and new API, bug ridden runtime, inconsistent behaviours of a markup language processing and styling implementation etc. pp. We all need to get our act together and the harsh reality is, most of us just don't know everything and there isn't time to know everything. We need basic stuff to really just work and be as simple as possible given the problem domain, else we will not progress without gigantic investments.