Is there any discussion in webdev community whether using typesetting engine from 80s is even a good idea for modern performant UI apps? Or it's just taken for granted and never questioned?
So it's true that there's still a "typesetting engine from the 80s" in there, but there's also a powerful layer of app functionality built-in as well. It's reasonable to question whether all of this belongs together, but all of this evolution _has_ allowed for whole new classes of applications to be delivered securely and quickly to all sorts of devices in the browser.
To me, most of the issues with web apps stem from the fact that foundation is just not built for that task. Like these weird selection issues, where you move cursor 1 pixel more to the bottom and it selects the whole visible area instead of text - that doesn't even make sense. Or jumping page and blocks all over the page while it loads fonts and stylesheets. Sure, we build more hacks on top of existing hacks to mitigate this, but that's just duct taping with complexity, not the engineering.