alt Hacker NewsThis misses the point completely for repeated arguments that make no sense "Its historical ...".
The reality is, you lose programmatic control when you use HTML directly. Its much easier to have Dialog component that reacts to its state, than to use the native dialog tag.
Indeed, HTML is like the assembly language of the web: clunky and very limiting to use directly.
That's why we have to resort to all kinds of libs that render and manipulate HTML. And from there comes the need to bundle large amounts of JS with pages, and almost all other web development "sins"
A real pity, elevating HTML to be actually directly useful for rich interactive UIs should have been a primary activity of the relevant working groups.