For cases where you can realistically include a full v8 in your project, yea - that seems fairly reasonable nowadays.

Javascript took an extremely high-complexity, high-cost, and nearly-all-effort-in-just-two-impls-for-over-a-decade route to get to the current (stunning) performance though. How do small-scale embedded interpreters stack up? That's what many things that aren't Electron apps will be using.

I ask this honestly, to be clear - I'm not sure how they stack up. I know Lua has historically targeted and dominated this area so I'd expect it to win, but I have not seen any data and I largely agree - JS is a massively better development environment now, and I would love to choose it. Everything I can find pits it against v8, and that's kinda like comparing the performance of a bike against a train - they are so different in many situations that it's meaningless. Otherwise I'd probably choose WASM today, or maybe docker containers where performance and platform needs isn't an issue.