PWA are not as good as apps - and not because of OS vendors restricting APIs.
Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.
Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.