The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me.
At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.
Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince just one of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.
They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support.
So I'd say if you can't get all four to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.
The Internet is a network. The web is an oligopoly. Google, Google-by-proxy, and Apple fill the dog bowl, and the rest of us eat from it because it is there.
At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.