So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.
If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?
Once hybrid became possible it was immediately clear that it was the easiest way to get a decent quality app deployed on both iOS and Android. It was a big enough deal that around the time I attended that VSIP event and then PhoneGap Europe, or perhaps shortly afterward, some backlash against hybrid started off with a few big companies trumpeting about how they'd started off native, gone to hybrid for a few years, and were now going back to native again (principally for native experience and performance reasons).
But I think the pressure has always been in the hybrid direction, particularly if you're resource or budget constrained and need to target both platforms, or the web is your main platform (whether than be mobile or desktop). I'm sure the Epic vs Apple fight didn't do any harm, but I don't know what real difference it's made.
The reality is that maintaining two native apps plus a web app is a pain in the ass, especially when you realise Swift - whilst a good language - is a wrapper over some decidedly tedious APIs and a lot of Objective C legacy that you probably don't want sucking up a lot of time. If you want/need apps, it's so much easier to stick a native wrapper around a responsive web app, and that will work well for so many use cases. Not all, by any means, but most SaaS, LOB, or CRUDy apps will do fine as hybrid.
That's why people make apps that collect things even none of the users want them to. And if you can justify the permission box with some actual functionality, then it just increases the 1% to a far higher conversion rate.
There are literally dozens of ways to track web users that are not available in apps without explicit user permission