It makes more sense to ask "compared to what?" and look at what's going on in the lateral client application platform space.
On iOS, it's very hard to target the foundation with higher level competing abstractions not because the foundation nails it but because the foundation isn't built on simple primitives that area easy to target. You have one blessed way of building iOS apps (UIKit) that's then, over the period of a decade+, slowly replaced by the next blessed way to build iOS apps (SwiftUI). And you generally have to wait for Apple to build APIs that you need because you're not given solid building blocks to do things yourself.
Most discussion around web client development takes place in a vacuum where we look at it and go "well it could be better" (or "it's a dumpster fire"). But that's either a trivial or meaningless statement in isolation. It's more interesting to at least compare the state of web clients with what is the cutting edge state of the art across all client development. When you do that, I don't see how most HN claims about the dire state of JS actually hold up.
