Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Could we ever lose the HTML centered model? This is what people should be worried about, not replacing JS. It became a kind of popular hot-take for a while to say that separation of concerns was a mistake, and that's not how apps get built in the real world, and what we really need is a way to encapsulate all of our DOM and CSS in JS. We need to start pushing back against that idea and keep emphasizing that separat…
It’s a bad render target, and it’s only half the story. It’s html + css that’s the render target. Separation of concerns happens because the render target is a over complicated mess. So separate the good parts out of the mess as much as possible but the mess is still there.
Of course HTML for interfaces is more complicated than something like canvas, because it forces you to think about your UX on a deeper level than "this component should be on the left". The point of HTML is that it forces you to build a universal interface that works for everyone -- it forces you to sit down and build a human-digestible, pure-text tree that communicates your current application state to users.
HTML on its own is a render target. CSS is a completely optional secondary display modifier that you put on top of that render target.
This is why adblockers work, it's why stuff like Reader View works in Firefox. Because it turns out that forcing interfaces to be pure-text has substantial benefits for end-users. Try building something like a UI-level adblocker for a native app. You can't do it -- it's impossible.