The speed advantage of edge compute reduces when most compute for your application has to happen back in a data center anyway.
The fabled iot, self-driving car examples, as well as services like Stadia could never be run in a worker, which is why for Workers at least, speed isn’t a primary advantage.
I don't really see the data locality being solved either. Sure data travels the shortest path to Cloudflare and you could use Cloudflare KV for storage. But in reality, who uses a KV store for everything?
One would still have to run databases with regional sharding in the critical locations (I'm thinking Crockroach even though I've never ran it myself). And if you're already running a database you could be running code there too, and just proxy requests through to yourself in the closest location (maybe this is what all the rage is about with workers, proxying differently depending on origin region), but i could see this being done without Turing complete language support.
EDIT: I do see how Cloudflare KV could be used as the caching layer and help there, but that's all i see. I would love to hear how someone else can/has made use of this.
The fabled iot, self-driving car examples, as well as services like Stadia could never be run in a worker, which is why for Workers at least, speed isn’t a primary advantage.