This sort of thing can happen with installed apps too, but the likelihood overall is far lower, especially if selecting judiciously.
The overwhelming majority of web apps don’t need filesystem access or similar special functionality, and thus users aren’t forced to install them.
In my personal experience, if my interest level in an app is so low that I wasn’t willing to install it, I was never going to use it in the first place either because the app wasn’t compelling enough or I didn’t have any actual need for it.