> Respectfully, it sounds like you haven't been around the internet for so long

Incorrecet

> How do you do multithreading?

Webworkers. Before that, sometimes iframes.

> How do you open a port and receive network packets?

Webrtc, hopefully https://wicg.github.io/local-peer-to-peer/

> In order to run code in a language other than Javascript, you had to wait years for WebAssembly to become usable,

GWT, CoffeeScript, examples go on and on and on. You did have to wait years for wasm. But also, it's fine and in some ways far far better that there are de facti languages for the web, and that's been a huge part of why it's so uniquely rfc8890 compliant, in ways that no mere platform has ever been.

There's more out there alright, but it's still this libertarian what can I do. It's the developer centric view. None of these other platforms improve what can we do. None of them have the ambition to be available on tens of billions of devices. None of them are connected by default, networked, in anywhere near the way the web is. None of them have multi-polar governance & cooperation.

I'm very glad there's other things happening. But also their ambition has been very low. The web remains ridiculously different than every other way to run processes, while everything else (except Erlang/beam) clusters very very tightly around writing single processes that need libraries to build up to http or websocket or grpc or quic. There's been a tragic failure to think anywhere near as big as the web, to develop models where something declarative like the page leads the charge, grounds the programming model in something material, constructible, clear.

Google as far I'm concerned did make the web, added heat and pressure to keep going, to not stop here, to make it fast, gave us examples of use like (via acquisition I believe) Google Maps, and Gmail. We would still have had a web, but the parallel reality if they hadn't been finding browsers, spec writers, dev tools: it's a ghastly impoverished sad world, one where native apps actually look like a good choice for the world.