Designing an API is a ton of work, especially if you care about backward compatibility (otherwise you may as well use that internal API). And at some point will

Designing an API is a ton of work, especially if you care about backward compatibility (otherwise you may as well use that internal API). And at some point will be deprecated for removal. Without a standardized way of writing devtools - assuming the web standard is overall simplified - you can expose a more specialized API without the baggage associated with standards, break it every so often, and make it as easy as possible for developers (potentially even users) to port other devtools to it. I believe that instead of finding the "universal API", we should embrace the fact that there will be 15+ of them, and therefore simplify the porting process.