I appreciate the notes on the different nuances of "serverless".
I think you might not be very familiar with how people typically used CGI in the 01990s and 02000s, because you say "[serverless] is a return to a simpler CGI-like programming model, but it's pretty explicitly about the fact that you don't have to manage the server..." when that was the main reason to use CGI rather than something custom at the time; you could use a server that someone else managed. But you seem to think it was a difference rather than a similarity.
Why do you suppose we were running our CGI scripts under NCSA httpd before Apache came out? It wasn't because the HTTP protocol was super complicated to implement. I mean, CGI is a pretty thin layer over HTTP! But you can implement even HTTP/1.1 in an afternoon. It was because the guys in the computer center had a server (machine) and we didn't. Not only didn't we have to manage the server; they wouldn't let us!
As for Python, yeah, I'm pretty disenchanted with Python right now too, precisely because the whole Python ecosystem is just constantly breaking. And static files are kind of a problem for Django; it's optimized for serving them from a separate server.
I think you might not be very familiar with how people typically used CGI in the 01990s and 02000s, because you say "[serverless] is a return to a simpler CGI-like programming model, but it's pretty explicitly about the fact that you don't have to manage the server..." when that was the main reason to use CGI rather than something custom at the time; you could use a server that someone else managed. But you seem to think it was a difference rather than a similarity.
Why do you suppose we were running our CGI scripts under NCSA httpd before Apache came out? It wasn't because the HTTP protocol was super complicated to implement. I mean, CGI is a pretty thin layer over HTTP! But you can implement even HTTP/1.1 in an afternoon. It was because the guys in the computer center had a server (machine) and we didn't. Not only didn't we have to manage the server; they wouldn't let us!
As for Python, yeah, I'm pretty disenchanted with Python right now too, precisely because the whole Python ecosystem is just constantly breaking. And static files are kind of a problem for Django; it's optimized for serving them from a separate server.