The web is an anomaly yes, but it has broader reach than any other platform in the history of mankind. Thinking that native apps will kill the web is to miss the forest for the trees. None of these proprietary platforms have the reach of the web. No computing device maker can release a credible device without web support. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't make your proprietary platform cross the chasm the web has crossed. Apple can't do it, even open-source Android can't do it, because Android is runtime, not a standard.
The common narrative of PC app -> Web app -> Mobile app is only superficially accurate in terms of where the tech hype was at different points. But in terms of long-term life cycles, mobile apps are much more like PC apps, and the web is something else completely different, which we've never seen before, and mark my words, it will not disappear or be superseded anytime soon.
The web ten years ago was indeed different when clean markup, separation of concerns, accessibility meant something.
Nowadays it is just a mess, cannon fodder in the battle nobody asked for.
It "meant something" for a tiny fraction of web developers. The vast majority of developers in 2005 was probably either using Flash or creating something that only worked in IE (with its 85% usage share).
Yes, I totally miss the good ole' days of bitching about IE getting the CSS box model wrong, despite the fact that it was the better implementation and as soon as the standards gods deigned to bless us with 'border-box' everyone kind of pretended those threads on css-discuss never happened... Or endless bickering over the best unit to declare font-size in, because of course it made absolute sense to leave accessibility to site designers, not browser implementations... Or posturing over why 'float' was actually a valid layout concept for anything besides a block of paragraphs with images interspersed... Or the endless clearfix or image replacement hacks... Ahh yeah, the good ole' days...
The common narrative of PC app -> Web app -> Mobile app is only superficially accurate in terms of where the tech hype was at different points. But in terms of long-term life cycles, mobile apps are much more like PC apps, and the web is something else completely different, which we've never seen before, and mark my words, it will not disappear or be superseded anytime soon.