So Figma is written in JS and C++, compiled to WebAssembly so it runs in a browser, which runs in a datacenter, with video streamed to Mighty, an Electron app where the front-end is written in JS and some C++, running inside Chromium.
I feel like we engineers are putting too many abstractions on things. It's like we are all peddling "get rich quick" schemes to people trying to weasel our way into some super popular process. This screams like an anti-direct-to-consumer model.
STOP CREATING MIDDLEMEN! It's going to cost me 30 bucks to just browse the web where I spend another dollar amount to where someone collects a "handling fee". Jesus I feel like the world is going nuts.
Aside from your HTML interpretation there's another interesting thing that's been tried by a remote browser start up bought by cloudflare, called, I think it was, s2. They hooked into the chromium rendering engine skia drawing instructions and instead of sending screenshots or video from the remote browser to the client they sent the skia drawing instructions and then rebuilt the entire rendering of the HTML client side.
Point taken. But there's a time and a place for everything - nowadays we have the tech to stream the contents of the desktop, and quite probably to it real time. So you could say the problem HTML was solving is gone.
Then good news, between modern software development practices, NFTs, and just plain fucking laziness and incompetence, there won't anything left of it soon!