it’s basically “customers use crappy laptops -> we decided to make them use web browsers” which sounds insane to me because web content IS the reason why tons of otherwise unnecessary upgrades are done in recent 10 years or so

We do processing on the cloud because our customers use crappy laptops. We use a web browser because:

• convincing customers to get approval for our app is hard (corporate IT), whereas they already have a recent browser
• it's faster to get the result we want
• our dev env (macOS) is different from our target platform (Windows); this is because it's easier to work around our IT Dept than with them (and nobody on the team likes Windows), and our servers are Linux, and macOS is close enough for BE dev
• audits are easier - just need to test the API, not the whole desktop app platform since auditors trust the browser

The same is true for my the other project I mentioned. If your business is largely B2B, then browser apps are a much easier sell than a desktop app. We're getting a little pushback as we're breaking into a new market, so we're turning to Tauri to provide a desktop-app experience, a different keep the web app for the rest of our customers.