I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale. Scale around big tech giants, to concentrate wealth, exploit gray areas, and magnify harm.
I used to love JavaScript, but when I look at what it's become, I'm glad I left it. We weren't doing the world any favors by contributing to a massive body of casual execution of untrusted code.
The web was a mistake, but I think the internet, good old TCP/IP, still has a few tricks up its sleeve for us yet.