Earlier quoted context omitted.
A web app that cannot handle a text file bigger than X bytes doesn't become useless, in the same way that a native app isn't useless even though it, too, has a limit on the maximum file size it can handle.
Any text editor that struggles to load a large text file on a modern computer is, simply put, inefficient. If 20 years ago they managed to write programs that could handle such cases and today many (web) apps fail at this task means we're going backward. My point is that it's much harder to write efficient code in the web ecosystem because you're bound to specific abstractions from the browser. Once deviating from sa…
I don’t know that I completely agree. It depends on the functionality offered, right? Like vim, for example, can struggle with very large files if you ask it to do syntax highlighting all the way from the beginning (or, it can give you syntax highlighting that is just wrong if you don’t). I don’t think vim is very inefficient (could be wrong there, though), and I don’t see any way to generally do syntax highlighting without looking at the whole file (although, of course, in practice there are often shortcuts for specific languages…)