I hear you and I agree, but for now it’s the best we’ve got.

WebKit (e.g. GNOME Web, vimb, surf) is always there, and Servo is coming on leaps and bounds.

Also, for your consideration, there are:

• w3m (text-based, but supports displaying images with sixel, kitty, or framebuffer)
• Links2 (surprisingly usable)
• Dillo (better engine, but less features)
• NetSurf (better again, but you can’t use a custom search engine and the JS engine doesn’t seem to work)
• Chawan (text-based, but actually supports modern HTML and CSS; can display images using sixel or kitty; also supports gemini^[1])
• Ladybird (bad dev, good product)
• Stargate & Duckling (HTTP to Gemini^[1:1] proxies, so you can browse the web with Lagrange)
• Pale Moon & Basilisk (based on a fork of Gecko; still use XUL; may be a bit less secure, but disable JS and you might be alright)

Of course Librewolf, Waterfox, Tor Browser, ans Mullvad Browser are doing their best to resist the bullshit.