The original reason is that they existed before Web pages were powerful enough to do all of those things. Today, it's purely for evil reasons, e.g., to be able to refuse to run if root is detected, to be out of reach of adblocking browsers, or to be able to harvest more of your private data. Now on iOS, there's still some ways that Web apps are lacking, but that's an evil reason too: Apple bans all non-Safari engines, and intentionally limits Safari, so that they have control over everyone via App Store rules.
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The original reason is that they existed before Web pages were powerful enough to do all of those things. Today, it's purely for evil reasons, e.g., to be able to refuse to run if root is detected, to be out of reach of adblocking browsers, or to be able to harvest more of your private data. Now on iOS, there's still some ways that Web apps are lacking, but that's an evil reason too: Apple bans all non-Safari engines, and intentionally limits Safari, so that they have control over everyone via App Store rules.