Browser vs server-side is always going to be a tradeoff, yeah. In some cases you're ok with paying for server time, and then don't need to depend on clients run

Browser vs server-side is always going to be a tradeoff, yeah. In some cases you're ok with paying for server time, and then don't need to depend on clients running your code. But in other cases it's much more cost-effective to run code on the client. Note that the browser has gotten a lot better in the years since repl.it moved away from running code there. In particular wasm parses and executes a lot faster and takes a lot less memory than JS.