What should embarrass us so deeply and why? HTML and CSS are some of the most generative, enduring, and transformative technologies ever. I wouldn't fund anyone who doesn't recognize how great they are!
They're embarrassing once you realize what's been done in the past, with incredibly smaller 'stacks' in much simpler systems, producing more powerful capabilities.
HTML and CSS require that a large amount of information be pre-shared and implemented by different systems (i.e. all browsers need to implement ginormous standard with all subtleties). After all that, you don't even get much interactivity, you need Javascript.
A better design would be to share a tiny set of primitives that are designed to compose nicely and that can be used to build up much more powerful apps.
HTML & CSS were good for the early web, when it was a simple document layout platform. They're not ideal for building rich UIs and applications. Just because they've been extended to allow that doesn't mean they are the best tool for the job. Similarly, Excel is abused to do all sorts of things it's not intended for as well, when there are better options for databases, financial applications and data science.
There is a huge difference between Excel and HTML: the former is Turing-complete (in addition to containing Turing-complete scripting language(s)) and was like this for as long as I remember, while HTML is not. I guess CSS nowadays may be Turing-complete (?), but HTML is most decidedly not.
That difference means that it's orders of magnitude easier to "abuse" Excel to do some things it wasn't designed to do than to do the same with HTML. I seriously wonder if the reliance on HTML to this day is not a kind of "job security" thing for web devs (like myself, btw)...
