Remember MS-DOS also succeeded because of its "strengths" in some very special, narrow sense. In the more ordinary sense, it succeeded in spite of its weakness, but Windows has slowly recovered from that and is now a good system.

The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a good way to put hyperlinked multimedia on the internet and (b) hyperlinked multimedia turned out to be the thing that masses of users wanted.

The subsequent effort to retrofit that and turn it into a zero-install software delivery platform is where all the insane hackery comes from; and the hacks that succeeded didn't have to be good. They are just what worked at the time with some combination of IE, Netscape and Flash.