Exactly. When I first did a web front end it felt exactly like customising MS Word with VBA. No matter what you put on top of it the roots poke their heads through and it feels like a mess.
Yes, yes. Flash (with AS3) was a first-class web application platform. There were buttons and views and "movie clips" and other stuff for you to place on a blank canvas, all very customizable. Then there was Flex, a full-fledged yet relatively lightweight application framework built on that foundation. You created your layouts with XML, with live preview. There were Android-like layout containers (emulating Android's LinearLayout with HTML+CSS is still not quite trivial in 2022 — the defaults on flexbox are bonkers) and there were ListView/(UI|NS)CollectionView-style lists with reusable cells, among other things. This was 15 years ago! I can't even begin to imagine how many workarounds one would need to implement a list with reusable cells with HTML+JS even if targeting only the latest Chrome and Firefox.
HTML is a document format at its heart and there's no getting around that, but <object> is/was a nice escape hatch.
