The desktop as it is right now is, imo, just fine - as in it's barely there. On Mac (work), I use cmd+space (Spotlight) to open apps, ctrl+` to open up a terminal dropdown, and maybe some Finder here and there. On Windows (leisure) I just use the windows key (open start menu, focuses on the search key) to open up things, and usually it's one of the game launchers (e.g. Steam).

The OSes are not in my way right now. If anything, I want app builders to move away from web technologies. Steam should be a native app. I suspect the main reason that we don't see more native apps is that the native UI toolkits are limited in their design options / freedom.

I wonder if there's work being done to compile web apps into something that improves performance. WASM is one step I guess, but that's only the 'executable' part of it; we need something similar for the DOM + styling. Or Electron / Chrome should do more aggressive (and persisted) optimizations.