A framing from that podcast that helped me better understand the role of Bonsai is that it's really a framework for building incremental distributed state machines.
> Bonsai itself -- this library -- is actually more generic than the above makes it sound. It allows you to build general-purpose incremental, composable state machines. Bonsai_web builds on top of that core library, specializing it for interactive browser-based UIs, but we also have Bonsai_term for building interactive terminal-based UIs.