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That's kind of what i was thinking - somewhere between good ol' cgi and a reverse proxy ....

Unfortunate because I'm semi-looking for a simple service that will let me configure a stateful new frontend to an old API - title made me think it might be along those lines.

There's a huge difference: CGI is the ultimate backend in the HTTP stack, while this allows you to run scripts as middleware (ie modifying the response headers/body based on previous processing)

Not necessarily true. CGI could shell out to other CGI code if it wanted to. Turtles all the way down.

What if the backend is not CGI ? What if I want to use a script to gzip the output of a backend that doesn't compress anything ? Of course you can just call that backend through HTTP, but then you add another huge dependency on your little script that should just be as simple as "gzip -c -"

Correct.