I had such high hopes for tree-sitter but once it went all "and then, $CC -c -o" all was lost :-(

What do you mean?

Unless the system that wishes to consume tree-sitter grammars has access to a linker, it being written in C, and then compiled to machine code, gravely limits the places it can be consumed. That's in contrast to any one of the hundreds of grammar compiler compiler systems that allow targeting a platform of choice without mandating a platform of choice. I do see that tree-sitter alleges to emit wasm, but I am not deep enough in that ecosystem to know if it means "wasm for the browser," or "wasm for extism[1]," or "wasm, but if you already have WASI" or what

1: e.g. https://github.com/1Password/onepassword-sdk-go/blob/v0.2.1/...