I've recently realised that most of modern day's web stem from the fact that it's not a platform. It's still just a barely functioning system to display text documents.

That's where all the complexity comes from: people are trying to build/collect the missing pieces of a platform, and then try to build their stuff on top of it.

And you can see it everywhere: from CSS (which still pretends that modularity doesn't exist or that complex constraints in layouts do not exist) to DOM (which hasn't seen a proper API design in years) to Javascript (whose idea of a standard library is adding an underspecified `fetch` after 15 years of people writing wrappers around XMLHttpRequest).