"It just radiates jank" ... that line resonates with me, but is sonehow a bit attractive. Like this is how things might be done in some alternative grittier universe. Like this is how Kaylee would make data formats execute on the Firefly. Its steampunk programming.
OP would probably have a field day with NixOS's patchelf tool:
> But after getting the linked script setup working, even though it seemed like it should've been enough, it absolutely refused to work. It would only give me an opaque exec format error error, no matter how many different shotgun debugging things I tried, I ended up spending something like six hours over the course of two days on it with no real progress.
I think I would have eventually just loaded up a debugger and binary searched the codebase until I found the spot returning the error.