Eh, XML is as much of a superset of JSON as the Turing machine is a superset of context-free grammars. The former has all the _power_ of the latter and more, but the mapping between them is non-trivial, far from an embedding.

I think it's fine to say C#'s data model is a superset of Java's or Rust's a superset of C's, but XML and JSON is too far for me, personally.

Do you consider high working hours to be a benefit akin to higher pay? I think fewer hours and less money is a fair deal for employees.

I don't think it's a superset. You can represent any structs-and-arrays data in XML, but you have to make non-trivial mappings to make it work.

The obvious way is to use elements for everything, but then you're mapping both structs and their fields (very different concepts in e.g. C) to elements. Attributes map nicely to struct fields, but they only admit string values.

> This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time

React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out.

The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply.

(Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s. Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)

Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.