Benchmarking Nostr event parsing in JavaScript ("leaner" means a very simple and performant binary format):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1653275/238050896-2357981f-411f-40fc-a4f4-653013c0066a.png
If these results are right (I'm not sure they are) that means JavaScript is very not-great-at-all dealing with binary things and if Nostr events were designed to be binary from the get go that would entail a massive performance loss for web, react-native and JavaScript clients of all sorts.