Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp.

The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.

Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.

Web browsers have good (not perfect) sandboxing, costs no fees to "submit" and are accessible to everyone on every phone.

Simple, UX.

The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.

You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.

Mmh, the examples you've listed are actually super easy to do if you're using a framework such as angular with it's plugins for pwa and touch controls. And prolly tailwind for css/disabling selection if you really want to, but I'd call that an anti feature in almost all cases.