These kinds of sprite based games have been around for decades and used to be developed on hardware orders of magnitude less powerful. The fact that such a thing would ever have performance problems on modern hardware is a joke and shows how backwards web development is.
I like to think that web development with all these new "features" enable people a nice playground to get hooked. While I'm disappointed that the there is no easy "mode 13" to get started with fun graphics programming, I'm optimistic that a platform is getting built that enables people to iterate on making things fun that will then drive people to go deeper in the stack.
