51 karma · joined May 24, 2020
But more to the point, yes, a browser is a client, but without the economic incentive of either ads or direct monetization from users, many sites, YouTube included, would simply not work. Storage and bandwith costs money. Unless we decided to somehow fund all of this through some sort of additional tax through the ISPs or governments, ads or subscriptions are a necessary evil.
I'm not sure this answers your questions exactly, there are good reasons to sometimes use a more faithful emulation of a real machine, but it's also sort of legacy for many of the cloud use cases like multi-tenant architectures, where VMs are mainly used to keep hard boundaries between customers.
I would actually prefer if the Rust std would not include functionality that's not essential, for example sockets don't seem essential and the standard library does not implement them in a particularly complete and well thought out manner either IMHO.