> If people _insist_ on making phone apps as websites, there's Cordova and all that. Such apps are never very good, of course

I strongly disagree. We use Ionic (which is based on Cordova) for line of business apps, and the results are as good as native apps, but with the benefit (amongst others) of having a single codebase for both Android and iOS.

Hybrid apps aren't a good match for all types of app - games in particular - but they do work well for many others.