The nostalgia is real. Reminds me of the 'Falling Sand' game era.

For anyone trying to scale this in JS: the bottleneck usually isn't the rendering, but the object overhead/GC.

If you switch from an object-per-flake model to a single flat Float32Array for positions/velocities (Data-Oriented Design), you can typically push 10x more particles before hitting the frame budget. Keeping the memory layout cache-friendly makes a massive difference even in a high-level managed environment like V8.