The point of walled garden is that they are very tempting to stay inside off for users. Their power comes from most users not resisting that temptation.
Becoming the equivalent of a digital hermit and living in a hole in the ground outside these walls, which is what I would characterize this as, is not going to result on a lot of people stepping outside those walls. If you've ever watched Life of Brian, you'll have a good mental picture here.
It's a variation of brutalist web development (let's not call it design) that just doesn't really appeal to the masses. It never has. The history of the web is endless attempts to pimp it with Applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, etc. The latest incarnation of that is web assembly. This basically allows you to use anything native that works elsewhere (desktop, mobile, game consoles, AR/VR, etc.) in a browser as well.
Of course there's a severe risk of this to disappear into more walled gardens. But I don't think sitting in a dusty old hole in the middle of nowhere while shaking your fists at progress does much to change that.
Sometimes though, that dusty hole in the middle of nowhere seems to be the most progressive in terms of using standards, when the person sitting in it adopts new HTML elements, immediately having accessibility, while their JS-based rivals still struggle with restoring the functionality of the back button and adding routes in their SPA to get back something resembling normal linking behavior. In a way that is a much deeper dusty hole in the ground to dig for oneself.
Anyway, it is questionable, how much progress there is in moving into walled gardens and throwing multi megabyte websites at visitors, when we can have the same functionality with less.
I think there's a middle ground here where we're building good-looking web pages with a sub-10 MB weight. Unfortunately, it makes no business sense to do so.
Becoming the equivalent of a digital hermit and living in a hole in the ground outside these walls, which is what I would characterize this as, is not going to result on a lot of people stepping outside those walls. If you've ever watched Life of Brian, you'll have a good mental picture here.
It's a variation of brutalist web development (let's not call it design) that just doesn't really appeal to the masses. It never has. The history of the web is endless attempts to pimp it with Applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, etc. The latest incarnation of that is web assembly. This basically allows you to use anything native that works elsewhere (desktop, mobile, game consoles, AR/VR, etc.) in a browser as well.
Of course there's a severe risk of this to disappear into more walled gardens. But I don't think sitting in a dusty old hole in the middle of nowhere while shaking your fists at progress does much to change that.