I think the "app" form-factor is preferrable to a "website" for a lot of people. Almost every website I've built over the past 10 years (summing to ~900k-ish users) has had constant streams of users always requesting an app alternative to the website, quote "even if it's just the regular website in an app".
Why not both? Assuming it's running off a DB in the cloud, it should be simple enough for the developer to write a web front-end for it.
I try to keep my phone lean and mean, and I'm not inclined to install an app for something I don't use all the time. Heck, even if I were to use this all the time, I would much rather use it through a web interface.
The answer probably always differs, but for me I'm just one developer without any mobile dev experience and plenty of site features to keep working on -- so taking time away from the main product to work on a complex app equivalent (and implicitly commit to update/maintain it over time with each new feature) didn't make a lot of sense.
People don't like web apps and don't know how to install PWA's (by design of the OS manufacturers that make money from developers needing to pay to be on their hosted platforms). Like it or not, if you tell someone you have a product to use on their phone, they're going to want it to be in the App Store.
Web apps should be able to be listed in the app stores. I understand why people want to find things in the store. Younger generations don't really use the internet the way us old farts did. Discovery is no longer something that SEO and ad driven search makes organic any more, so discovery is nearly impossible. Instead of Yahoo style search of webpages, we have the curated search of apps via stores. Not that the app search is amazing, but it's still a smaller subsection than all of the internet which makes it easier.
