DOM is what's commonly known as "retained mode graphics" and the canvas is known as "direct mode graphics". You literally have the two primary strategies for visualization in a platform to use as you please, but you're unhappy. I'm curious why?

The browser APIs we have today have legacy cruft, no question about it, but they also have all the good, and modern parts any other system for GUI and graphics would have. It's surprisingly complete today.

I think browsers suffer an "image" problem, where we just assume what's there is bad, for some reason. I'd be curious to hear specific shortcomings you encounter in your work.

There's a big design space within the retained mode concept and you can see places where DOM probably isn't the right design for apps. For example, I've never seen reflow or the "flash of unstyled content" problem in real GUIs. Sure, there are ways to prevent these problems when using the DOM, but in traditional toolkits those problems are not present to begin with.

> For example, I've never seen reflow or the "flash of unstyled content" problem in real GUIs.

I've seen reflow happen with real GUIs when they're fetching tabular data (from the network or from disk) and the columns are flexible and stuff is too big. Or some frameworks love to hide scroll bars, so when those pop in, everything moves around a bit.

Unstyled content is rarer, because usually the styling information is compiled in, but sometimes that just pops in late too, more often when your computer is overloaded and storage and network are terribly slow. Sometimes you get a couple different revisions of splash screens as the thing starts up.

Traditional GUI toolkits are local apps, not streaming content.

That's true, but so are a lot of SPAs and Electron apps. I don't think downloading the whole app is much of a burden if it makes the UI less janky.

In the case of SPA and Electron apps, we have a platform used against its intended purpose and the companies doing the platform, paying for its R&D, simply don't care to optimize it for that side scenario.

Downloading an entire site is an existing strategy, what SPA means (single page application) and these are often terrible UX. You wait a lot for it to load, then it's clunky and the moment you navigate away by clicking a link, you lose a ton of your app state.