TFA links to a post by Kurt M at Fly which speaks to this, from a personal perspective. They are using sprites for a “production” workload - a tool for their family - and it’s persistent and accessible enough that they don’t have plans to move it.

https://fly.io/blog/code-and-let-live/

Thomas characterizes this as “believ[ing] that the future belongs to malleable, personalized apps”, which I think describes the use case perfectly. As a “barefoot developer” (to borrow another localfirst term, thanks Maggie Appleton), does every app really need more than a persistent home and an URL?

And so to your question “is the idea that these things can also/should run production workloads”, I believe “can” is right - but suspect that supporting “should” is on Fly’s roadmap.