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Well, I think for the use case most people use it for on the web, embedding a few equations in a web page, it's just fine, because everyone who writes about math already knows LaTeX. It doesn't really matter that no one is actually doing document-level typesetting on the web. It may be idiosyncratic in some ways but it's just too common to replace IMO.

I suppose by "internet" you mean "web" and in particular the fundamental problem you see is that LaTeX assumes the input contains everything needed for the final output, whereas hypertext on the web can be remixed in an open-ended way? I.e., it's hard to get pleasing results out of a process of composition of disparate LaTeX sources?

Otherwise could you clarify the conflict you have in mind?

Minimal example: LaTeX embedding as practiced on the web doesn't reflow. TeX was intended for documents that knew their width, height, margins and etc.; no guarantees in a web page.

Well, TeX hasn't been used much for whole web page generation. For math however, it is uncontended.