This change doesn't really do anything to remove the need for an API gateway or ELB.

However, with some Javascript it has always been possible to call a lambda directly from a web browser, it's just a bit complicated, and you can't use it to act like a general http webserver, the way you can with a lambda "proxy" integration.

https://www.mbejda.com/invoking-aws-lambdas-on-the-browser-c...

Yes you can, however you need IAM credentials which permit invoking the AWS Lambda Function and you need to sign the request using SigV4 with these credentials.

There is a somewhat incomplete answer on Stack Overflow for a similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57809234

I was always doing that using the python boto3 api. Just recently switched to API Gateway for some public endpoints and rest apis.

Not right now but I did read that AWS were planning to allow use of lambdas like this without a ELB fronting them in the future.

I dont think so.