I've been leveraging COGs recently to quickly bring satellite imagery into the browser for analysis [1].
[0]: https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/nli/landsat/landsa...
https://github.com/pedros007/mapserver-docker
Literally saves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by avoiding having to stage the imagery locally before serving it out!
Just like the SQLite example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025829
And there was a specific sub-thread in the conversation that mentioned using this for maps too!
UPDATE: Just read https://kylebarron.dev/blog/cog-mosaic/overview which is excellent and clearly you're already very on top of the range request mechanism!
[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/foobar2000-playlist-index-format/
https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2019-127-gnu-poke-an-extensible-ed...
Actually, it sounds like a fun weekend task to redo this GeoTIFF writeup in Poke :-)
The hex editor I rely on for multi-GB files is ired.