The keyword you missed is "retool". Completely rewriting your clients at scale as is always a big risk, it's especially risky when you're rewriting from one to

The keyword you missed is "retool". Completely rewriting your clients at scale as is always a big risk, it's especially risky when you're rewriting from one to many, and you need a much broader set of skills to boot. This specifically refers to overhauling the technical approach (see: Second System Effect), it doesn't preclude that a large company "develop an application that is actually good", in fact every company I've founded or work in has full native clients. On a more nuanced point, tradeoff is not strictly cost vs quality, it's also about velocity and consistency. The latter especially can have a huge impact on the perceived quality for common users, so the tradeoff is not as black and white as you want to make it.