> The web seems to be perfectly composable too, out of <div>, <span>, <p> and a small subset of CSS, but doing this is considered an anti-pattern, and you're supposed to reach for the platform to find the closest thing to what you need, whereas reaching for a library or composing yourself is frowned upon.
The web has a gazillion libraries...
Yeah exactly. So does native. So what? Why is this a bad thing?
Native apps are downloaded upfront and the installation is largely separate accepted by users. Web users expect websites to download and be usable immediately.
Almost every website I visit has massive pop-ups I have to dismiss. Clearly a cached fat library GET would be less annoying than what I already put up with.
I'm not actually a web dev and I think they would gain more from having a big standard library but I'm fairly sure the actual decision makers at the companies that own these websites don't agree with either of us.
They basically want to squeeze every bit of performance from the things that they think don't bring business value so that they can afterwards burden these websites with every advertising, tracking, compliance, cool animation (from their POV), etc library and tool on the planet. Basically bloatware.