+1 on your point about React making progressive enhancement easier. This repo and related technologies are rather neat!
> The biggest argument seems to be laziness: "Progressive enhancement is hard, here's a term that I can apply liberally to give myself an excuse not to bother".
It's always going to come down to the requirements and an understanding of who is using your web app.
In some cases, you should absolutely optimize for PWA... Facebook, for example, is a webapp that considers users in developing countries with shotty networks. They also optimize for those with blindness.
Implementing those features in a webapp like Kibana (visualizer for elasticsearch data) would be a wasted effort given the user demographic and the purpose of the app.
TL;DR: "It depends"
EDIT: I just realized I may not have addressed your point " I don't see why it necessarily applies to webapps but not to websites.". I think the answer is simply "Webapps are inherently more complex than websites, therefore, more strict web requirements need to be met". This is an easy way to compartmentalize it, but isn't an absolute.
> The biggest argument seems to be laziness: "Progressive enhancement is hard, here's a term that I can apply liberally to give myself an excuse not to bother".
It's always going to come down to the requirements and an understanding of who is using your web app.
In some cases, you should absolutely optimize for PWA... Facebook, for example, is a webapp that considers users in developing countries with shotty networks. They also optimize for those with blindness.
Implementing those features in a webapp like Kibana (visualizer for elasticsearch data) would be a wasted effort given the user demographic and the purpose of the app.
TL;DR: "It depends"
EDIT: I just realized I may not have addressed your point " I don't see why it necessarily applies to webapps but not to websites.". I think the answer is simply "Webapps are inherently more complex than websites, therefore, more strict web requirements need to be met". This is an easy way to compartmentalize it, but isn't an absolute.