Because Apple has always shaped so much of our development environment, it's easy to take these things as natural law. I'm assuming you're a younger developer based on your assertions – I would probably even agree with those suppositions based on the tone of posts like mine that seem anti-Apple. But the history of these technologies is glaring, and native/web/hybrid apps have never been given equal footing.

Nothing you said refutes a financial incentive in the app store, and most apps don't need "more power and capabilities", they need access to a basic API that isn't randomly crippled.

If you care about this subject, read about the history of UIWebView, WKWebView and hybrid apps, you will see how uniquely broken the platform is. Android doesn't suffer the same problems for a host of reasons, but that makes sense given Google's incentive for web. Hybrid and web apps are then not terribly appealing since they're only effective on one platform, so the ecosystem stagnates.

Here's a post I saw a few days ago, by coincidence: https://hackernoon.com/if-it-werent-for-apple-hybrid-app-dev...