To what extent is this possible for actual metal hardware? I'm sure lots of us are running PXE/TFTP systems and HTTP would be a heck of a lot simpler.

There's still the tftp->ipxe->http->??? path. TFTP only needs to serve a 300kb file which can then switch to more robust transport like http for the kernel/OS

You could bypass that by shipping iPXE on USB tho

On metal you also commonly have a BMC so generally that lets you attach an ISO or other storage you can boot from to bypass UEFI primitive PXE. This is probably the biggest one--use BMC functionality instead of UEFI PXE

At home, I use JetKVM or GL.iNet Comet network KVM to bootstrap commodity hardware without BMC (by attaching an ISO). Probably could make a cheap commodity device with Raspberry Pi Zero that does that same thing at lower cost although at that point you're back to "just use USB storage"

All recent servers support HTTP boot.

You can use iPXE https://ipxe.org/