I'm really glad you mentioned PixiJS - that would be a very compelling use case for me! I formerly built a lot of casual 2D / 2.5D games in AIR. Pixi is my favorite screen graph library now by far.
The biggest thing I think the JS/canvas/WebGL ecosystem is really lacking, sorry to say, is the ability to compile to .ipa and .apk, with something like AIR Native Extensions (which worked along the lines of Phonegap plugins to centralize access to Android and iOS APIs in a common library). Cordova is dead and there's no replacement. And Cordova was never really meant for writing games. Something like this with WebGL support that just opened a full screen phone app running PixiJS - even with just minimal connectivity APIs - would be a great option for quickly building indie games.
Yeah... I looked into that a little, but I've always avoided React like the plague. Looking at JSX just drives me up a wall, and I'm not into the idea of the React Native pseudo-DOM. Oddly it feels a little like Flex/MXML which also annoyed me to no end.
The biggest thing I think the JS/canvas/WebGL ecosystem is really lacking, sorry to say, is the ability to compile to .ipa and .apk, with something like AIR Native Extensions (which worked along the lines of Phonegap plugins to centralize access to Android and iOS APIs in a common library). Cordova is dead and there's no replacement. And Cordova was never really meant for writing games. Something like this with WebGL support that just opened a full screen phone app running PixiJS - even with just minimal connectivity APIs - would be a great option for quickly building indie games.