You can’t just compare across decades of software and hardware development. Even downloading native binaries would have been sluggish, as the download would have been slow with those download speeds.
I have a couple Quarkus apps that I've run in Lambdas that start in about a second. This is without using GraalVM too! Good enough for what I was doing (taking a list of file names, finding them in an S3 bucket and zipping them into a single payload)
Web pages at the time could at most <blink>, its interactivity was extremely limited compared to what we have know. Meanwhile a java applet could include a full-blown IDE/CAD/what have you
Well, web pages could submit forms, which was the main thing. I remember working on apps where we went with web pages because applets were too slow, regardless of the features we gave up. Images were generated on the back end instead, for example.
