Considering we have full replacement frameworks like React, Flutter, etc built as DOM replacements, I would say Swing was definitely the right thing for users. Probably could have offered an "easy markup enhancement" library for plain documents, but anything extensively dynamic should be written with a proper UI framework.
It's a hard sell for the majority of users and the mainstream market at the time. Flash apps had cute, lazy loaded, ~lightweight, animated mini apps. Anything java at the time was heavy, enterprisey, requiring more setup to get blocky GUIs that didn't do much.
