It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible.

ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions.

Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces)

There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would work, I'm not sure if the performance would be substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es and web unfortunately.

So we are where we are :)