I read this blog post, as well as "Rethinking backend with webtasks" [1], and I'm still not 100% I understand the motivation behind this - I'm not a frontend developer so I probably don't have the right perspective to understand. Here's what I can gather:

The service that this fellow works on, Auth0, wanted to offer very flexible ("write your own plugin code") customization to their users, beyond what webhooks can offer, and didn't want to require their users to host that code themselves. So he/they built a flexible, scalable execution runtime (the webtask runtime) that can sandbox and execute the arbitrary code provided by their users. Basically, Auth0 is hosting its own Lambda as a service for its users, specifically for running code in response to events/requests that occur within Auth0.

Is that right?

If I work on a simple application, not a service that needs to offer this kind of extensibility to its users, does this concept have any benefit to me?

[1] https://tomasz.janczuk.org/2015/04/rethinking-backend-with-w...