No. I don’t want to transpile. I don’t want a bundle. I want a simple site that works in the browser. I want to serve it as a static site. I don’t want a build step. I don’t want node_modules. I want to code using the language targeted for the platform without any other nonsense.
Javascript is cancer. Fucking left pad?! How the fuck did we let that happen? What is this insane fucking compulsion to have libraries for two lines of code? To need configuration after configuration just to run fucking hello world with types and linting?
No, fuck Typescript. Microsoft owns enough. They own where you store your code. They own your IDE. They might own your operating system. Too much in one place. They don’t need to own the language I use, too.
“Let’s use a proprietary improvement to fix the standard that should have not sucked in the first place” is why we can’t have nice things.
No.

I’ve worked with Swarm in a startup setting. It was an absolute nightmare. We eventually gave up and moved to Kubernetes.
That said, your use case does sound simpler. As I recall, we had to set up service discovery (with Hashicorp Consul) and secret management (with Hashicorp Vault) ourselves. I believe we also used Traefik for load balancing. There were other components as well, but I don’t remember it all. This was over 5 years ago, though.
The difficulty wasn’t configuring each piece but getting them to work together. There was also the time burned learning all the different tools. Kubernetes is great because everything is meant to work together.
But if it’s just two machines with separate configuration, do you even need orchestration? Is there a lot of overhead to just manage them individually?
Unfortunately, it was too long ago to remember the details of differences between compose and swarm. I do remember it was a very trivial conversion.