It seems the developer works for Tailscale in an evangelist / developer relations role. I feel that ought to have been disclosed in this article.

That gripe aside - I love this idea and the general principle. Minimal OS's are really interesting to me. I've long dreamed of a basic environment where there are 3 UI surfaces: a Terminal, a Web server / browser, an OpenGL context. Of course, if you have a full capablity web browser you can emulate a Terminal and use WebGL for 3d.

Of course, things like this exist I am sure - but the idea that you could have one that is a dozen files is super compelling. It reminds me of how I was able to get a basic http server in C using civetweb which is a handful of files I can just copy-paste into my source tree. Or the handful of files sized libraries like raylib that provide huge amounts of functionality.