Predicting an enormous waste of time building UI frameworks with WASM and WebGPU

I am willing to bet (inflation-adjusted) 1000$ that in the next decade, multiple teams will see the advent of Wasm and WebGPU as a perfect reason to have yet another go at a cross-plattform UI framework. These projects will claim to have "native" UI elements, but it will be obvious that the are really just rebuilding everything to look like the native counterparts (similar to Flutter). Especially on macOS and iOS, major interactions will be unsupported or implemented in wrong ways (problems will likely occur around the menu bar, keyboard navigation, and integration with OS services). Scrolling will feel off on touchscreen devices and text rendering will differ from the native look. Still, some of these frameworks will have tens of thousands of stars on GitHub and be used by major companies. I would not be surprised if these frameworks were built with Rust and be seen by many as the thing that would finally bring Rust to the mainstream. I see it as likely that in whatever language these frameworks will be written, they will introduce some weird new syntax and paradigms to accomodate a more "intuitive" (probably declarative) style of writing UI code. Meanwhile, little to no progress will be made developing techniques and frameworks to build apps that are actually better for the end user.

You’re probably right. As an industry IT seems to reinvent the wheel on a cyclical basis, and every time it seems we get a lower-resolution polygon (combined with a drop in performance due to the ever-growing number of abstractions).

Qt supports WASM and I think anybody who wants to replace Qt framework is going to have a lot of work ahead of them.

I don't mind some people wanting to do client side web UI in their favorite server-side language, but do think it's a mistake for companies to have even more fragmented tech stacks and seems a waste of businesses time. But I do worry about the web becoming this opaque wasm blob that you can't inspect (easily) or manipulate with addons, css, etc.

Or some of these framework will finally mature in the next decade and solve remaining UX issues.

This will make branded, OS-specific UI frameworks mostly irrelevant.

There will be less of platform lock-in. Users will be free to migrate between platforms, as most applications will be avaliable on multiple platforms by default. UI/UX will become independent of a platform's brand. This will lead to increased use of alternative OSes among casual users.