@fiore @chjara @navi while i agree that big tech's hold on software ecosystems is a bad thing, i don't like the dichotomy that things are inherently bad because of big tech

that said, i still agree that the state of the web is pretty screwed up because it has turned into an all-encompassing monstrosity
like navi said, the sandboxing among other things belongs in lower layers of the OS because not everything can run on the web (for performance reasons or otherwise)

APIs like webusb are problematic because they break the mental model people have of the web compared to native applications
even with a permission prompt, giving web{sites,apps} access to arbitrary devices is a social engineering vulnerability against people who don't grasp the implications, and it's also way too easy to fatigue a user into accepting (this attack is proven to work even against savvy people, as shown by notification-based 2fa for example)
the bare minimum would be to make devices opt in via USB descriptor extensions just like windows does for winusb; ideally this should be bound to specific origins so that malicious webapps can't request access to unrelated hardware, but then we're getting uncomfortably close to DRM, so you'd need a bypass for "advanced" users and then it's a vicious cycle
which brings us back to this whole thing being a terrible idea in the first place
firefox is slightly better than chromium here because for the peripheral access APIs it does implement, it gates them behind site-specific extensions

also fwiw for the CPU example, I do think modern hardware is a perfect example of unchecked complexity that is incredibly misused
sure, the extra performance enables some cool stuff, but the end result is that people walk around with supercomputers in their pockets whose battery life is still pretty mediocre, because the software that runs on top is unnecessarily wasteful
a ~10 year old computer is now too slow to comfortably use, because software is increasingly complex without meaningful functional improvements
but yeah, this is a capitalism problem, not a technology problem