I just like this paragraph from Das Surma:
The Web Platform is a beautiful mess. It has been expanded and evolved by hundreds (thousands?) of people over the last couple of decades. It evolved from a document platform to an extremely capable app platform. The pace at which it is progressing is steadily increasing, too. This certainly has left stretchmarks. Some APIs on the Web Platform are decades old, while others barely have a couple of months under their belt. Every API can only make use of what the web had to offer at the time of inception, which leads to the notoriously inconsistent API surface. For example, many old APIs would benefit from JavaScript’s
The cost of convenienceasync/await, but that feature only landed in JavaScript in the late 2010s. As Paul Kinlan blogged a while ago, the web is “lumpy”.
Also:
And lest we forget, the Web Platform is owned by everyone and no one in particular, which means progress and consensus is a lot harder to come by than, say, Android or iOS. It has multiple, independent, often slightly diverging implementations. This has obvious downsides, but also advantages which are, admittedly, more subtle and not always very immediate.
Emphasis mine 💙