I wanted to show people how easy it is to do cool things with a computer, how low the barrier to entry is.* One HTML file. Your OS's built in text editor and browser. You look at the code and you can see it there in front of you! It isn't obfuscated. It isn't even minified. Everything is right there, all together. You can just save the file and drag it onto your browser. No Git, no zipped project folders. No build system! No server! (No MIME type errors!).

The "frictionlessness" of lowering the "activation energy", is not just nice for beginners... heck, it's nice for me! I can just download this file from Wayback Machine and continue hacking on it!

It does, of course, limit you to very small codebases, but that's what I like! Many small projects. The spring physics creature linked above is about 300 LOC total. The ASCII bonsai tree is ~100: https://web.archive.org/web/20220823113003id_/https://andai....

*In terms of tooling/setup, at least! Learning to code is another matter... (Neither of these projects are very readable for a beginner though, so that aspect needs some work.)