For most applications 1 location is probably good enough.I assume HN is single location and I am a lomg way from CA but have no speed issues.

Cavaet for high scale sites and game servers. Maybe for image heavy sites too (but self hosting then adding a CDN seems like a low lock in and low cost option)

Honestly, for my own stuff I only need one PoP to be close to my users. And I've avoided using Cloudflare because they're too far away.

More seriously, I think there's a distinction between "edge-style" and actual edge that's important here. Most of the services I've been involved in wouldn't benefit from any kind of edge placement: that's not the lowest hanging fruit for performance improvements. But that doesn't mean that the "workers" model wouldn't fit, and indeed I suspect that using a workers model would help folk architect their stuff in a form that is not only more performant, but also more amenable to edge placement.

I agree, latency is very important and 300 pops is great, but seems more for marketing and would see diminishing returns for the majority of applications.

many apps are fine on a single server

> But do you need 300 pops to benefit from the edge model? Or would 10 pops in your primary territory be enough.

I don't think that the number of PoPs is the key factor. The key factor is being able to route requests based on a edge-friendly criteria (latency, geographical proximity, etc) and automatically deploy changes in a way that the system ensures consistency.

This sort of projects do not and cannot address those concerns.

Targeting the SDK and interface is a good hackathon exercise, but unless you want to put together a toy runtime to do some local testing, this sort of project completely misses the whole reason why this sort of technology is used.