My only gripe is that the tile metadata is stored as JSON, which I get is for compatibility reasons with existing software, but for e.g. a simple C program to implement the full spec you need to ship a JSON parser on top of the PMTiles parser itself.
At that point you're just io bound, no? I can easily parse json at 100+GB/s on commodity hardware, but I'm gonna have a much harder time actually delivering that much data to parse.