Sure, if you cut corners, place some hard buffer limits, discard the vast majority of the specification, and don't care about breaking parts for brevity, HTTP s

Sure, if you cut corners, place some hard buffer limits, discard the vast majority of the specification, and don't care about breaking parts for brevity, HTTP starts to become tractable. But even a minimal HTTP server, even one that ignores things like HEAD requests, is still going to be more complex than, say, receiving the URL raw, or even a URL wrapped in a simple structure like a netstring. Actually implementing a full, correct HTTP server would be one or two orders of magnitude more complex that implementing a more modern protocol from scratch.