The process of getting content on to the web has historically been pretty daunting, and is IMO much easier now than the bad old days when a .com domain cost $99/year and hosting files involved figuring out how to use an FTP client.

In comparison, services like Now from Zeit, Netlify, Surge, heck, even RunKit, make this stuff so much easier in comparison now. As long as the performance optimizations are something that can happen automatically with tools like these, and are reasonable to use yourself even if you want to configure your own server, I think that's a net win.

I do agree with you though that we ought to fight tooth and nail to keep the web as approachable a platform for new developers as it was when we were new to it.

On balance, I'm more comfortable with services abstracting this stuff, since new developers are likely to use those services anyway. That's particularly true if the alternative is giving Google even more centralized power, and worse, access to more information that proxying all of those AST files would allow them to snoop on.