I just see the results and how it is handled on other sites. This file limit I only know about on itch. Other sites do not have this. And I know that the explanation given was decidedly not about performance when starting a game, nor about server load.
And I also see on most web games, itch or not, a continous loading bar or have a singe up front waiting time, till the game starts. This indicates to me, that all that is necessary is transferred at the start in a continous manner. If this operation is such as to have a single request for each file inside a server side archive, than something should be optimised on browser and server side and the html5 game stuff as a whole.
Also, there should be a html5 specific way of packing assets, precisly to combat such performance issues. Is there? Regular game engines have such a thing. What is best practice for html5?
I suspect that "html5" games using the tech as intended are the exception - like loading levels on demand - and most are just exports of other game engines. But this makes me wonder, if the large number of files is indeed an issue, why do those engines not export the files in a packed way. Instead they bloat their export file to have thousands of files. Are they just bad at it, or is there no good support for this?
So, as I wrote above, what is the intened "native" way for html5 games to handle large amounts of assets?