These are all fair points, thank you!

Primary reason is that computers where I run it might not have shell and emacs installed in the first place, so I can't connect to a remote port.

However you got me thinking: do you know any emacsclient implementations that run purely in browser? Presumably that would be not that hard to implement and will make more sense.

Although I still think I'd not expose emacs daemon to the outside: it's basically shell, so if I was doing it, I'd dockerize it anyway.