[matheus-rr]

The practical pain with Web Streams in Node.js is that they feel like they were designed for the browser use case first and backported to the server. Any time I need to process large files or pipe data between services, I end up fighting with the API instead of just getting work done.

The async iterable approach makes so much more sense because it composes naturally with for-await-of and plays well with the rest of the async/await ecosystem. The current Web Streams API has this weird impedance mismatch where you end up wrapping everything in transform streams just to apply a simple operation.

Node's original stream implementation had problems too, but at least `.pipe()` was intuitive. You could chain operations and reason about backpressure without reading a spec. The Web Streams spec feels like it was written by the kind of person who thinks the solution to a complex problem is always more abstraction.

[zarzavat]

It's news to me that anyone actually uses the web streams in node. I thought they were just for interoperability, for code that needs to run on both client and server.

[apitman]

You need to use them for things like Cloudflare and Denos HTTP servers, which is actually a fairly common (and nice) pattern:

https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/