> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."

Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.

To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA

I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.

I agree there is some confusion around PWA installation. There are some proposed web standards with Google and Microsoft's backing to help with that, e.g. Web Install: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...