This is not a new concept. Let's take a look at TensorFlow website, the site is basically Colab notebooks. Colab being free and requiring just a gmail account a

This is not a new concept. Let's take a look at TensorFlow website, the site is basically Colab notebooks. Colab being free and requiring just a gmail account allows people to easily just run TensorFlow examples within seconds. This a specific case for Python, (other projects such as Pytorch, Google Cloud documentation, Beam follow the same patterns). When your README wants to show users runnable code or quick starts in my experience that's what user ultimately and if you can achieve this, people will actually use the README. From maintenance perspective, your README notebook may not be runnable in all Notebook environments which may be ok if user at least can render the content.