We had functional applications for forms and the like, in the 90s, running on machines with 8MB or 16MB of memory. They weren't as pretty, but they had simple development paradigms, VB and Delphi, easy to get started.
HTML has been the wrong place to make creating UIs (as opposed to marked up text) for such a long time. Things are getting better from multiple angles, but it's still very uneven.
It's always easy to solve a problem by taking away a number of it's requirements. VB was good at forms but visually unacceptable for branding. It was difficult and unsafe to deliver over the internet. And again, there were a LOT of really bad VB applications that hurt usability and performance.
If all you're doing is building forms for an application then it's acceptable, but that's an easy problem solved with elegant solutions today as well. HTML can immediately deliver the styled application without installation to every device regardless of OS. It can propagate changes without reinstallation. It is accessible for every kind of user. And it does this while looking miles better than any VB application.
HTML has been the wrong place to make creating UIs (as opposed to marked up text) for such a long time. Things are getting better from multiple angles, but it's still very uneven.