Well, yea, that was a remark about HTML's legacy. In pre-AI era, I preferred QML or GtkBuilder (when viable, of course) to HTML any time. Nowadays, to be honest, I don't know.

That said, yes: NeWS, XForms, rio, and many others have tried with arguably cleaner designs. Not without their own issues, but in comparison to HTML, driving GUIs was a design goal from day zero (not a direction shift), and they're a lot smaller and simpler (which has its pros and cons).