Manual instructions and dev time doesn't necessarily pollute the state of the machine though and are harder to replicate, which is how I would interpret it.

Not having your application packaged up for quick removal strikes me as more polluting. And I don’t really see how an independent solution with almost no documentation and zero configuration management support (eg Ansible) is easier to replicate than a battle tested industry standard with widespread support.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against building things for fun. But the technical arguments made for why this is preferable over an established solution doesn’t stack up.

I do.

Just as I would use this (would look into it more first though), the netcat trick mentioned here or python3 -m http.server over ever considering installing Ansible and/or nginx/apache.

Totally different use case though.

If I was rolling my own and concerned about polluting, I’d favour a language like Rust or Go because I then don’t need to install the Python runtime, have random undocumented dependencies for the bash etc.

Or I’d use Docker.

But as said before, there’s no wrong answer here since it’s just a hobby project running on a HTPC.

With that I agree, I would only use python if it was already installed, and the assumption with bash was that everything needed was already installed.