I did not know this until today... vision models don't hunt for the white space between letters like old OCR does. They just chop the whole image into a fixed grid of equal squares (patches) and treat each square like a word in a sentence.
I found it interesting, that Git itself has built in similarity notion... when it packs objects, it groups files by path+size, runs delta cmpression to find which are close.
I am with you here.. there is actually name for why companies do this. They are not pushing app because it is better, but because browser tab cannot lock you in.