Yes. This is the essential description of the situation. Or, put more empirically, if the web is terrible, why did it succeed by orders of magnitude over what

Yes. This is the essential description of the situation. Or, put more empirically, if the web is terrible, why did it succeed by orders of magnitude over what preceded it? I have fantasies, like every other dev, of controlled, predictable, statically verifiable, friendly, elegant, safe systems that also reach billions of people, with instant distribution, nominal cost, and low barrier to entry. Maybe these things are not (a posteriori) compatible. We used to call this “rich vs reach”. Still seems true, perhaps essentially so.