What? The canvas is not new, you've been able to dump the DOM and make canvas-only UI for many years.
The "new thing" is just improved code sharing if you are making a canvas-y thing for multiple platforms. And letting people use their preferred language if not JavaScript.
This defense that Canvas exists therefore replacing high level shared web constructs used for nearly ALL interaction on the web with the lowest possible level thing the web has (pixels) seems to spring up a lot.
It doesn't seem like much of a defense to me, that a graphical target used to enable WebGL and generative graphics to exists- to enable some creative options- doesn't seem to imply it's good to replace all structured hypertext markup with pixels.
Google Sheets and Figma are the only two webapps I can name that rebuilt with heavy Canvas components, and Sheets getting rid of DOM broke a ton of crafty web extensions/userscripts & pissed a lot of people off. Sheets is also mostly HTML still, except the spreadsheet itself, because it means people's tools & extensions for many things still work & because it's a fine technology for developing almost all webapps in.
What? The canvas is not new, you've been able to dump the DOM and make canvas-only UI for many years.
The "new thing" is just improved code sharing if you are making a canvas-y thing for multiple platforms. And letting people use their preferred language if not JavaScript.