TwitchPlays-Raspbian VS piku

So, for some context, I am a student doing this as a project for class and my end result was to hopefully run a game for the class to join in on. For the past few days I've been trying to get this project to work using this neat guide I found on GitHub linked here: https://github.com/jiinurppa/TwitchPlays-Raspbian. Everything seemed to be going well until it was time to run Retroarch with the NES emulator as the guide suggested until I realized that the Raspberry Pi severely struggled to even run the NES emulator (currently testing with Super Mario Bros. 3). Nonetheless, I continued on with the guide to see if I could at least stream the game to Twitch which did not seem to work either. I have now stumbled upon RetroPie and wondered if this sort of thing could be accomplished using RetroPie instead of a regular Raspberry Pi OS image with Retroarch. The part that seemed most complicated to me is that RetroPie being its own image, does not provide easy access to files and scripts that I would need to make something like this possible. Thus I now ask for help here to see if anyone has carried out a similar project and could teach me how they managed to do it.

I should add one to https://piku.github.io (spoiler - this doesn't use Docker at all)

I like it. I wrote Piku (https://github.com/piku/piku) with much the same interest in fixing some of my pains, so I get where you're coming from with this. Will drop it into one of my current projects to build ESP32 binaries :)

I never had any serious issue with SD cards since the Pi 2B (and I've kept Pis running for years).

Anyway, for those wanting to deploy more generic apps, that is why I initially wrote https://github.com/piku/piku - you still have to flash the OS (and rpi-imager does that with sane defaults these days), but once you're done you have Heroku-like deployments for any language runtime you install on the Pi.

I also have https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init, a cloud-init like shim that simplifies setting up machines (I'm a big fan of cloud-init, but since Raspbian doesn't support it and Ubuntu on ARM requires some fiddling to make it work I decided it wasn't too hard to roll my own).

(I probably should look into glueing that into rpi-imager, but there is are only so many hours in the day...)

I automated that away a long time ago: https://github.com/piku/piku/blob/master/piku.py#L814

Piku https://github.com/piku/piku

So, stupid question: why couldn't I just use the 'baremetal' OS provided by Hetzner, install Postgres, Redis & node, create a separate db for each app, and run each app with https://github.com/piku/piku on a different port? For backups, I'll setup crontab to dump dbs locally and to S3.

piku?