The bit about "thick apps" always stuck with me. Partly because the name is funny, partly because it hit close to home. The first time I saw his talk, I was an intern working for a company that had built an entire compiler, IDE, and debugger in-house for their little industrial IO boxes. The compiler was written in C, and we used Emscripten to turn it into some JS that then got "compiled" (see: concatenated) into a giant HTML file with the IDE and debugger bits. Code uploads and debugging happened over ethernet, so all of that just got shoved through Ajax.

This sounds cursed, but customers loved it. Since it wasn't an EXE, it didn't get caught up in their employers' overzealous corporate IT filters. That's why we never switched to Electron. In a sense, we had some of the primeval elements of the thick app.