I am using the Panca Archers from the quest (save the village or something?). It's too early in the game to have researched the archery tech.
It's a huge world, insane world and insane AIs, most of the choices at maximum (resources, mobs, quests, etc.), and my custom kingdom sov vs 6 AI empire sovs (the 4 default and 2 I created).
Just fought a corpse spider (from the rat quest). Repeated the battle twice (so 3 total), and in the 3 battles it webbed a melee unit (the militia we start the game with) twice and my sov once. This was against the same army (with the Panca Archers) so the corpse spiders' targeting seems ok (from the admittedly small and anecdotal sample), and different from the Black Widows'.
Would the black widows have different targeting priorities, perhaps due to different abilities? That different mobs would have different targeting priorities is a good thing, as long as they don't do 'stupid' targeting (and webbing ranged units would seem to fall into that category).
EDIT and yes, that web would adversely affect initiative is logical and would be a good fix (apart from the 'web ranged units' fix)!