It can be quite useful 
The tiny-ecs repo I shared uses the same original tiny-ecs with a single modification (added a system counter for calls - so I could check systems call count during operation). The server can hook straight into pretty much any tiny-ecs setup. I will add docs on how to do this.
Love the little exploding game too. Its very nice.
Some things Ive found with tiny-ecs (and ecs in general too) are that they arent really ideal for very large entity counts. Up to about 100,000 is pretty good. After that, lua’s hash hurts it. Thats were I would move to a more graph oriented system (like the opensteer proximity database).
Also, if you have many systems it really needs some load balancing and sequencing, but that is a fairly small use case set. Overall its great for building game systems quickly, that need entities to be managed in some way.
if you are interested in the repo for the server + tiny-ecs its here:
https://forum.defold.com/t/tiny-ecs-http-server/77253
Sorry to cross post, not sure if you had seen the topic.
Thanks for sharing!