It's very, very far from a CRUD app or "just updating a DB". GUI-heavy apps are notoriously hard to get right. Any kind of "editable canvas" makes it 10x harder. Online collaboration is hard, so that's another 10x—there are known solutions, but it's an entire sidequest you have to pour a massive amount of effort into.

Custom text editing and rendering is really hard to do well.

Making everything smooth and performant to the point it's best-in-class while still adding new features is... remarkable.

(Speaking as someone who's writing a spreadsheet and slideshow editor myself...among other things)

"Having CRUD operations" and "Just a CRUD app" are very different things.

The custom text rendering bit alone should have been a good cue for this distinction.

That was the point. It is a CRUD app but it is not just a CRUD app.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario with a non-trivial app that is missing a create, read, update or delete operation. I'm coming up with so few examples that I have to imagine the colloquial use of CRUD app means just CRUD operations.

When people say "a CRUD app" they mean "an app that is mostly just CRUD"

This might have been the response trcf22 needed.

But sure, I’m being too pedantic here I suppose.

You should look into figma. Its one of the few marvels of software engineering made in recent times.

If you want to know how tough realtime editing is, try making a simple collaborative drawing tool or something. Or an online 2 player text adventure game

Theres a reason tutorials for those arent common