I'd say the one really important thing web is missing is notifications for when your not on the site. I don't really know how a browser could ever implement in a similar fashion.
I think you are being a bit overdramatic about JSX. There was zero learning curve -- except for a few errors initially when using class instead of className...
The argument that DOM.div() is more readable than <div/> is honestly hilarious to me. Any non-trivial tag structure will be unnecessarily complicated through the API. Especially when you can just write it almost exactly how it's going to look when it becomes HTML in JSX.
Sometimes it's worth it. A real pain with tables is that you can't have it be positioned relatively. So if you want to display an absolutely positioned tooltip next to a row it becomes a gigantic pain and i'd argue impossible — or extremely hacky — without using JS.
Yeah 130k being barely a living wage is an absurd thing to say. Tons and tons of people in NYC do not make 130k — even half of it would be a great salary for most — and they seem to still be living just fine.