I think that was the idea behind NetKernel.

I've built something similar, a Deno library called "TDAR"[1], and it works well, but it takes some work to wrap up all the command-line tools that expect to work in some mutable filesystem so that you can pretend you're calling pure functions.

[1] I haven't got around to pulling it out of the parent project[2], but I talked about it in this youtube video: https://youtu.be/sty29o8sUKI

[2] If you're interested in this kind of thing you could poke me to open up the source for that thing. togos zero zero at gee mail dot comb