ABIs are not enough, it is a huge pain in the ass to setup the function invocations, especially cross-platform. Having separate compiling and linking steps for each part of the codebase and stuff is a huge pain.

I think Bun (NodeJS-compatible runtime) was planning to add native support for importing C and Zig code directly from JS with typescript codegen. But even that is still a bit meh, you also need some data-exchange format so you can pass complex data structures without paying a serialisation/deserialisation cost.