For a lot of front end devs, CSS/JS are frowned upon. We use it because we have to. In fact, we typically avoid JS by having TypeScript transpiled to JS. Not to mention CSS is still very inconsistent across the various browsers.
Porting HTML/CSS/JS to native apps is another big problem, which is why we ended up with Electron/WebView. The amount of RAM it gobbles up just to run simple apps is pretty horrible.
Why Rust? It's a strongly typed application language across browser and native. It also has a massive ecosystem and this allows us access to all of it.
BTW canvas is only the renderer. There's a lot of engineering that went into making the canvas not a typical "canvas UI app". We have solved accessibility, touch gestures, direct/immediate draw etc.
Porting HTML/CSS/JS to native apps is another big problem, which is why we ended up with Electron/WebView. The amount of RAM it gobbles up just to run simple apps is pretty horrible.
Why Rust? It's a strongly typed application language across browser and native. It also has a massive ecosystem and this allows us access to all of it.
BTW canvas is only the renderer. There's a lot of engineering that went into making the canvas not a typical "canvas UI app". We have solved accessibility, touch gestures, direct/immediate draw etc.
There's more reasons behind this if you're keen, I've written up a more comprehensive doc https://dev.to/zionsati/html-javascript-css-should-have-died...