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JS/HTML can be run on your own machine without needing any cloud or other external service. You could distribute the application as a single .zip file or something, like binary executables often are. I've seen people sell games this way.

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Yep, this is not a bad idea but unfortunately browsers do not allow you access to local storage since they do not treat the local filesystem as designated domain paths.. which is completely super annoying & makes offline webapps a very temporal thing since they NEED a domain name cached before you can use them.

Note: based on my experience when hacking around with local app 2 years ago on Chrome and FF so things may have changed?

You can use node if you want those kinds of permissions. Or any other general purpose language with runtime.

Node is not exactly "can't fuck it up" simple.

The whole point of running and using browser apps is that they are guaranteed to be sandboxed - Node.js breaks this sandboxing 100% which makes it more powerful but also inherently a mess security wise. This mess can to a certain extend be accommodated on the server side but certainly not on the client side where code from 1000s of devs will eventually be run without vetting.

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