Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been trained to look for apps in the app stores. PWAs aren't there, and have a different installation method, for technical reasons that shouldn't matter in most cases. If you ask differently: do you want apps that install almost instantly, and take almost no space on your phone? A lot of people would be interested. Renting a scooter or charging an EV tends to require native apps for no good reason. These…
Well Apple's proposed solution is App Clips, which is what Spin (and perhaps others?) use: https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/ Of course, an efficiently-coded webpage (e.g. no JS-heavy libs) could also work, with arguably less hassle all-around. But native apps do tend to "feel" nicer.
I’ve seen App Clip in the wild only once, and it was a barely functional stop-gap-app that asked me to download the full app to finish the registration :/
I assume that the proposition of making a second app, Apple-only, which has even more restrictions and technical challenges than regular apps, is just not economical to catch on.
JS is often bloated, but there’s a lot of tooling for diagnosing and fixing the problem. There are libraries that care about size. Minified JS is pretty dense anyway.
Swift and its frameworks can easily be as bloated, but it’s harder to inspect bloat in compiled code. Languages with generics aren’t easier to keep in check than JS. You can easily accidentally multiply your code when it’s monomorphized, or prevent dead code removal when it’s not. It’s easy to find iOS apps that are 10x larger than a bloated website.