You can ;) We are not losing sight of the lowly shared hosting users. The only tough requirement - which many shared hosting companies already provide - is commandline/ssh access so you can use/install composer.
There was one extension that managed to do that with one nested level, but it's been abandoned. I also know of a commercial party whom are currently working on a threaded view extension as well.
Just before releasing stable we revisited this choice and looked at alternatives like vuejs, react and svelte. But mithril came out as a winner, it's very thin, extremely flexible and extensible. Especially extensibility - for us - has been a huge factor, because that is Flarums superpower.
Now that we've added typescript, things only became easier.
Aside from bundling an Akismet extension, as a development team we constantly adapt to changing spam runs and publishing these preventions for the public to use. Additionally, being extremely extensible, third party developers have contributed extensions that provide spam prevention and cleanup too, like stopforumspam and others.
I think the right word would be "empowerment". Software opens up the ability of communities to grow. Security, usability, accessibility, performance and many more factors play an important role to empower communities in growing a great community.
A new version of FoF Upload is being worked on to truncate unused files and map uploads to posts. I think it would be a great addition to add user restrictions too. What an excellent idea, it's the first time I've see someone mention it.
Although Flarum scales very well, it is not losing sight of shared hosting environments. The only requirement is composer/ssh; hosting providers usually offer these nowadays.
Flarum only released its first stable last year and so has some features missing, yet https://extiverse.com already lists over 500 extensions compatible with Flarum v1.3. Relying on much used technology allows for fairly easy adoption by developers to contribute.