> The over-complication is recursive

The phrase "fractal of bad design" comes to mind.. Although it was originally used for PHP, this anti-design-pattern seems to rear its head almost inevitably with popular and long-lived languages/systems (which I suppose includes C++, though I'm not qualified to judge).

I've heard people pinning hopes on WebAssembly. It does seem possible that eventually it could allow new languages to replace CSS and JS, maybe even support the development of new kinds of applications that replace (the current paradigm of) the browser as a cross-platform VM.