Embedding your assets like this isn't always an improvement. For example, I work on a site with a Go server and static content pages, and I like that I can update one of the pages and see the change instantly without having to re-compile the entire server binary just to get the new files included.

Easy enough to have the app check the regular file system first, then fallback to the embedded fs. You could have the best of both worlds.

Of course Visual Basic 2.0 and Delphi 1.0 both had embeddable filesystems. Even updateable embedded filesystems (which worked because the exe would really be a zip files. Zip files are indexed from the end of the file. So you can prepend the actual executable code and that would work. Zip files are updateable ...)

I believe after a while you also had sqlite-inside-the-exe things.