This is completely spot-on (well, disagree some about the coding standards and best practices part) and just calling it an old fart rant is way underselling yourself :)

The irony is that the current/next generations who have never seen/used/built a non-stock desktop app will not know of this big-step-back that happened, and will think that this is how things always were.

With so much moving to mobile, this comparison is becoming more irrelevant though. And on mobile native apps are very much still alive, due to many of the reasons you brought up.