A whole website in a single JavaScript file

The only semi-interesting thing here is that this demo pulls dependencies from 3rd party registries via HTTP without an explicit install step. It's really not that different than doing regular Node.js development with a committed node_modules (hi, Google), except that if node.land or crux.land go down, you've lost your reproducibility.

The thing about "familiar/modern techonologies" seem like superficial vanity. A vanilla Node.js equivalent might look something like this

    import {createServer} from 'http'
    import {parse} from 'url'

    const route = path => {
      switch (path) {
        case '/': return home()
        case '/about': return about()
        default: return error()
      }
    }

    const home = () => `Hello world`
    // etc...

    createServer((req, res) => {
      res.write(route(parse(req.url)))
      res.end()
    }).listen(80)

The browser still has to fetch and render the HTML. JS-heavy sites do tend to be slower, but no site has a 0s TTI/FCP.

Deployment for a vanilla node.js thing is as simple as adding `node index` as the entry point in your favorite provider (because they all have node.js images these days), I've had such a thing humming along for years. Again, it's really not rocket science.

> except that if node.land or crux.land go down, you've lost your reproducibility.

Dependencies are cached. This is no different from if npm would go down.

> The only semi-interesting thing here is that this demo pulls dependencies from 3rd party registries via HTTP without an explicit install step

Given that this seems interesting to you, it seems you haven't heard of Deno (https://deno.land). It is not related to node in terms of environment, its a new completely separate runtime.

In regards to your node example, this is fairly different: the dependency pulled in from deno.land is a wrapper around the built-in http server, which does various error handling for you and simplifies the usage. The router isnt a simple switch statement either; its a URLPattern (the web's version of path-to-regexp) based minimal router. Campring these to the node built-ins isnt exactly a fair comparison I would say.

Also on top of this, with node you need a configuration to get typescript working, then you need a package.json, etc etc.