Agreed - for the quality experience there's really no substitute. Maybe the author thinks that this will change (technologically speaking) in the next 7 years, but I doubt it. Things will definitely improve, but there'll still be reasons to code native apps. Desktop still has tons of native apps - it's not all running in browsers. We're in 2018, and your web browser is leaking memory and performance is sub-optimal (try scrolling through a large number of threads on Reddit and observe your CPU usage).