You write: "The one thing that would be good seeing as the page is a viewport onto a larger canvas is auto-scrolling the viewport when the pointer approaches the margins - so we don't have to chase, make visible, and manually grab the browser scroll bars. That would make the page naturally follow where our attention currently is." On my Powerbook I move the page using two fingers on the trackpad and on my iPad or smartphone I use one finger. No need scroll-bars.
You write: "The one downside I noticed for the exemplar page is the browser CPU load. constant 33% of 1 CPU on an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X with Firefox v103.0.2, and around 32% with Chromium v104.0.5112.79." In fact you can see on top of the frame-editor the cost of computing the page, it's about 30ms on my iPad. When the page is loaded no more CPU cost. The Hilbert curve CSS animation and the linear_watch (JS setInterval()) have a very small cost.