Why are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole
There is no denying the importance and usefulness of web apps. You and me may be fine writing JS/TS, but many don’t want to. Why shouldn’t there be an option that works better for those folks?
People use either Java, PHP or NodeJs.
By and large "people" are not "displeased" by Python. But every language has a set of diehards, people who dedicated decades to this or that and resent adopting anything else. They will complain no matter what. Python is displacing a lot of other platforms in its continued rise, so the noise keeps going up.
In addition, there are groups of nerds that love to formalize absolutely everything in their code, development speed be damned; and people who will optimize every line they write to an inch of their life (again, dev speed be damned). Both those camps are often uneasy in an ecosystem built on duck-typing, "practicality beats purity", and an overall approach favouring development speed over machine speed.
Really, I think the main driver for isomorphic Python web libraries like this isn't general web apps (though they'll get used for that, too), but the putting frontends on data science, ML, etc., stuff where Python is the dominant tooling language.
Jupyter and Shiny seem adequate for that.
Which is why I'm a bit surprised that RPC/APIs still have as much overhead as they do, especially around types.
And, while Phyton would not be my preferred choice for robotics, I did write kernels for small 'autonomous' mobile robotics a long time ago in C. The systems ran at 20 hz. I'm pretty confident modern embedded computers running Phyton can achieve 20 hz sense/think/act cycles.
Kind of a weird thing to say when the domain is web frontend where the default (which this wraps) is JS, another “scripting language”, to the extent that label actually means anything (which it mostly doesn’t.)
Tons of software exists for this reason. For example, somewhat relevant here, web apps in R via R Shiny: https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/
(There is also Shiny for Python IIRC.)
I'm in this camp.
For services that I'm building that are not heavily frontend reliant, I don't want to learn a whole new language and framework
There's a time and place for quick and dirty interfaces to kick off server-side code, which is what this feels like.
There is definitely that barrier to entry to have to write server side routes and html/js to interact with them.