I find some irony in that some 20 years ago, while there were pure-html web apps, eg. web-chats using <meta refresh...>, there were also java applets (remember the <applet> tag?), which were fast and used common inet-family sockets. I believe, they were mostly booed because security and privacy concerns. The applets were small (bytecode, so no interpreter required) and allowed using same language (statically typed) for both frontend and backend. Now, instead of making them more secure, we have xmlhttprequest, web sockets, node and typescript or webasm with minified and obfuscated scripts. Well, evolution paths are often curly.