I agree, file access via upload/download concept is friction on the user experience. I'd love to see serverless offline HTML applications with permission based file system access, because you can do so much very quickly in the browser with access to GPU, bluetooth, USB even, but I'm not holding my breath because of the security implications
Redbean looks good, I didn't know about the APE format, but unfortunately doesn't solve the file system access problem without presumably rewriting a backend in Lua. Docker, reluctantly, is better than nothing.
I suspect Justine will eventually do what the Cloudflare Workers team did, which is after having originally only supported Lua, to start supporting JS (albeit via quickjs in the redbean case, rather than V8) and then see wild uptake.
Redbean looks good, I didn't know about the APE format, but unfortunately doesn't solve the file system access problem without presumably rewriting a backend in Lua. Docker, reluctantly, is better than nothing.