I don't know that I buy that being the strategy, at least all the time. HTAs were a very early swing at what 'Progressive Web Apps' are today and back when you had access to activex components, etc those apps could do tons of stuff. Of course, the security attack surface was a nightmare so that all got slowly murdered, but I think at one point there probably was a serious attempt to let people build real apps using web technologies.
Google promotes building (and builds themselves) in such a way that it only works well on Chrome, just barely works on Firefox and Safari, and doesn't work at all in any other browser.
Unless you count reframed Chromium as "other browser", the equivalent of using Microsoft's IE-based WebBrowser component back in the day.
Without ActiveX support of course as that depended on Windows DLLs.
Not that that was a bad thing though. As mentioned it is a really bad idea to auto download code off some random website and execute it. Naive we all were back then...
