Jonathan Blow

It continually amazes me how peoples' brains don't connect these. Okay, web people don't know how to make games, but they surely have at least seen footage of these games and know they run on the same computers. How do they think all those pixels end up on the screen?

Sure, nice. Now please explain, if it's that simple, why skia & webrender are so HUGE projects, done by groups of very talented people. And why isn't there any simple 2D GUI lib for that. All other libs I'm aware of have their tradeoffs.

I think, with the evidence presented above, you should maybe re-evaluate your claim that these groups are "very talented".

Another possibility is that they are actually talented, but the foundation (the web, browsers, etc) is too awful to create high-performance software on.

skia is just 2D canvas lib, it's not browser-related at all - it's also used by sublime text, flutter, sciter, ...

I see. I use Sublime Text every day and it runs pretty flawlessly. I will admit I am unfamiliar with Skia, but if it's a 2D rendering library I struggle to think of any reason for it to be huge (though I don't know how huge you're talking here).