The issue with web UIs in general is that it's still too hard to get optimal performance (eg. make sure you leverage the GPU as much as possible, don't force reflows, etc.). That could be solved by better tooling but we're not there yet.
Just watch a few Google I/O tracks, and there is always the future of mobile apps is Android on the Android tracks, while the Chrome/Web tracks are pushing for the future of mobile apps is Web, with an occasional jab at native devs, as if on the room next door they weren't talking about native development.
Then to make it even better, now we have Flutter as the third track.
While PWAs are slowly being adopted by everyone else, Google is the company pushing them.
They even have a Web Site just for PWAs, https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/, so yeah politics.
What isn't so understandable is having a speech as if on the next door employees of the same company weren't exactly speaking the opposite.
I don't understand how in stage A one can speak how glorious the future of native apps is going to be, while on Stage B we are hearing how web apps are going to win the war against native apps and PWA are the path to it.
But you do have to admit that UI latency on it was quite high compared to iOS. I mean, so was Android back then, but they improved it significantly.
There’s good reason to blelieve that given enough time and even a fraction of resources that the Android team had WebOS would be able to significantly up their performance game (I say a fraction of resources because there is a lot of well funded open source development being done to improve web tech on mobile, through Chromium, WebKit and Firefox that would be leveraged).