It's visible to everyone that "the stack" is being rethought in that direction since DHTML became a thing (which was many, many years ago).

It does not matter much that it was not originally designed this way. it does work, it is still mostly backwards compatible. I could build an app in react today that works on both Chrome 40 and Mosaic (`NCSA_Mosaic/2.0`). I could switch set of views, add a transform in front of the virtual dom engine, replace the vdom entirely, render to canvas and then send images + linkmaps (so '90s), because the technology is so versatile yet simple.

The document model, in all its simplicity, with its elements and hyperlinks, has allowed us to build an enormous, completely new market for services with relatively few costs, that has been malleable enough to work on basically every device, use-case, etc. We stream video with it, process payments, we connected the whole world with it (people! not hosts).

It's like the old "if only unix weren't there". But of all the things that were launched on the wall, only unix stuck. Like the vhs, like the linux kernel, like tcp. It's obvious that despite not being technologically superior, there were benefits to all these in practice.