There was some traction & interest in https://github.com/w3c/p2p-webtransport but haven't seen any activity in a while now.

I'm pretty cocksure certain a whole industry of p2p enthusiasts would spring up building cool new protocols and systems on the web in rapid time if this ever showed up.

Yes and not in Safari yet either. Someday I hope that all parts of WebRTC can be replaced with smaller and better APIs like this. But for now we're stuck with WebRTC.

This a very early draft I'm following: https://wicg.github.io/local-peer-to-peer/