If I were designing flutter I would do exactly the same: bypassing all the legacy baggage of HTML, DOM, etc. and going straight to the pixels. The deal breaker

If I were designing flutter I would do exactly the same: bypassing all the legacy baggage of HTML, DOM, etc. and going straight to the pixels. The deal breaker for me is jank however and I do see some in the flutter-forward-demos page when I press the "resize" button. That said, I can imagine fixing jank on platforms you don't fully control is going to be difficult.