Comment by wasmperson

> I think the biggest problem is that the DOM was built for documents, not apps.

The world wide web was invented in 1989, Javascript was released in 1995, and the term "web application" was coined in 1999. In other words: the web has been an application platform for most of its existence. It's wrong to say at this point that any part of it was primarily designed to serve documents, unless you completely ignore all of the design work that has happened for the past 25 years.

Now, whether it was designed well is another issue...