Some of us still remember the golden years of doing the same but with jQuery snippets spread through hundreds of files with zero logical connection between them except in the developer's mind.
There's nothing on the web even approaching 1990s desktop applications. Specially if you care about latency, precision, and text inputs not randomly eating what you type.
Even with the wonkiness, the web is usually worth using because of the access you get to big amounts of data and backend servers providing nice services.