Obviously the following can't be taken at face value:

> lightweight headless Chrome Electron [...] with only a small overhead of cookie policies, cross pipe scripting, modern auth tokens, 2-factor authentication between client and server, SAML, and a tiny surface area increase for security concerns but only a few dozen MB or so.

However, there's probably much to be learned from the history of the web when it comes to security and compatibility between different implementations and successive evolutions of a protocol. http certainly has merits, given its long history. It isn't flawless either, of course.

Even features such as compression could make sense at first glance, though they would be a better fit for a dedicated tool like piping to zstd, since you control both ends of a pipe. Range requests, multiplexing, server-sent events, etc, could have some use. And it isn't like making a http server or client is so hard with a small library, given you already pull in libc or worse.

http probably wouldn't be suitable as-is, certainly not over TCP (though the fopen/fclose dance is quite close to it), but making it a fully fledged bidirectional protocol could be interesting, especially if you can somehow build on top of the system IPC on a microkernel. It could be a way to forward hardware access and such.