Because this is not actually useful in any way whatsoever. The point of citrix is accessing legacy desktop applications running on some server via a light desktop client. The whole point of that is not having to replace those legacy applications and not having to install them locally. The business is allowing companies that have ancient stuff being able to continue to use that. It's worth a lot of billions because lots of companies just have decades worth of software that their businesses depend on.

You are right that citrix should be able to dumb down what they have to basically a glorified web application that accesses their servers. Which apparently is a thing for obvious reasons (as in they thought of that too, many years ago).

I suspect the complicated bit of Citrix isn't the client, rather at the server end to manage multiple instances of apps running efficiently - where these apps are design to expect they own everything in the enviroment.

There is also

https://www.windows93.net/

Oh wow, such nostalgia for the simpler days! Thanks for sharing! :-)

WASM will probably put them out of business, given that you can recompile an entire desktop system including VNC etc. to it.

Best comment here. Never thought about if from that angle, considering my hate for window in window.

Everything that runs inside this "desktop" environment is made for it. So it is definitely not competing with Citrix & co. which are made to run existing stuff under existing operating systems...

Not everything is made for the web. Most software in use today is not. You live in a bubble.

that's the problem: if you look what companies are actually using, there's definitely a lot of non-web technology going on there.