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.