@muan @slightlyoff you're right. I've written some pretty big ones, GitHub size or worse (meaning higher traffic).
A lot of that stuff happened because you had to write C++ or at least pretty advanced JVM/C# code to really make it work. If it was Python or Ruby... making the client do it JS made sense.
Now, there's Rust, Go, and all the older ones are better too. I have done all of them. Astro seems close to the approach you're describing here.