Houdini is not that much different from CSS Shaders.
I don't consider it a stretch, as I see a future where Flash gets its revenge and HTML is only used to import the starting WASM module, like on those Qt WebAssembly demos.
I don't consider it a stretch, as I see a future where Flash gets its revenge and HTML is only used to import the starting WASM module, like on those Qt WebAssembly demos.
CSS shaders, like GL shaders, are declarative programs that look somewhat imperative. The GPU makes the decisions on how to shard/distribute those.
As for your second point, I agree to some degree. I don't necessarily see an issue with it - the two different models make sense in different places.