Early Android devices had a hardware menu button, press it, get a menu, simple and consistent. It can be related to the menu bar in desktop applications.
Android 3 and 4 broke it. Google noticed that many apps didn't know what to do with that button, and when they stopped relying on physical buttons, instead of trying to make things more consistent, they simply threw it the towel and removed the button. The hamburger menu replaced it. But unlike the physical button, it can be anywhere, or absent, or hidden behind a swipe gesture, or whatever the "UX designer" thought of.
Normally, the way you do it in a desktop app is to use the OS provided menu bar, preferably with standard labels like "File", "Edit", "View" and "Help". But in a web page, you can't do that, the menu bar is property of the browser, and because HTML never standardized menus, you take inspiration from where you can, and already messy mobile apps is the closest thing you have.
The problem is that now, people design their desktop apps like web pages, in fact, with Electron and the like, they are web pages. So every OS convention and standard widgets that help make things consistent go out of the window (pun not intended).
I think Google - which is at core a web company - couldn't consider mobile apps alone. By having an hardware button, apps and websites inevitably worked differently. Removing the button allowed for uniformity: everyone uses the hamburger.
Early Android devices had a hardware menu button, press it, get a menu, simple and consistent. It can be related to the menu bar in desktop applications.
Android 3 and 4 broke it. Google noticed that many apps didn't know what to do with that button, and when they stopped relying on physical buttons, instead of trying to make things more consistent, they simply threw it the towel and removed the button. The hamburger menu replaced it. But unlike the physical button, it can be anywhere, or absent, or hidden behind a swipe gesture, or whatever the "UX designer" thought of.
Normally, the way you do it in a desktop app is to use the OS provided menu bar, preferably with standard labels like "File", "Edit", "View" and "Help". But in a web page, you can't do that, the menu bar is property of the browser, and because HTML never standardized menus, you take inspiration from where you can, and already messy mobile apps is the closest thing you have.
The problem is that now, people design their desktop apps like web pages, in fact, with Electron and the like, they are web pages. So every OS convention and standard widgets that help make things consistent go out of the window (pun not intended).