amazing comments and callouts, thank you! I actually tried to load the raw image data blobs as a layer into MapLibre but couldn't figure out a way to do it and finally capitulated and did the "bad" move of re-encoding just to get the initial interactive map collection out the door for folks. It sounds like this is in fact possible but I missed something. I'll take a look at the Image and Canvas sources, thanks!

Re the webmercator reprojection - yea it's gnarly that I'm doing it clientside but it's exactly because I'm working towards the ability to layer them interactively on top of eachother (as well as on various basemaps). My projection code is also only half-working at the moment and it's where I'm currently spending my time next week. I'm trying to avoid building pipelines to re-encode the geotiffs as long as I can since there's 10+TB of them in my backend so this is why you're seeing me doing this clientside instead. This is a solo project so I need to be really picky where I spend my time so I can keep moving the ball forward

I'll join those 2 communities, thank you! Been crazy hard to find folks who are deep in this stuff so most of my learning has been through endless googling down deep dark corners of the web for the past 2 months