> Being tied to use only one version of Python/Pyodide (the one that Workerd embeds)
This isn't quite the case, you can choose between different versions using compatibility flags. For example, `python_workers_314` is the compat flag for Python 3.14[1]. You've also got compat flags for 3.13 and 3.12. Though it is worth noting that by using those older versions you will also be using older Pyodide versions too, which have fewer features (for example they lack JSPI support).
> Architecturally tied to the JS/v8 world, which may show some challenges as they aim to reduce cold start times
That is indeed a challenge. But our memory snapshot implementation has improved the cold starts significantly already and we will be working to reduce these even further. We also have sharding these days which reduces cold start frequency a lot. We wrote about cold starts (and sharding) in a previous blog post[2] which includes some numbers.
1 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/configuration/comp...
2 - https://blog.cloudflare.com/python-workers-advancements/