Without process isolation, all it takes is one bad Chromium commit or a incorrectly allow-listed JS/V8 command for this model to fall through regardless of how thorough the defense-in-depth/vetted Workers may be.
"the public clouds that run arbitrary native code in hardware VMs." -> Isn't it double whammy then that a V8 isolate + HW attack surface in combination could provide an order of magnitude more hackability?
"Last I heard there were still some lower-powered Android phones where the overhead was too high" -> I believe a Zygote-process fork was made available to Chromium at some point (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/l... ?).