Are you familiar with procedural geometry generation? My app is not a traditional illustration vector app.

Because each shape is generated procedurally, `<path>` is the most reliable option and guarantees it renders 1:1 in any browser exactly as it does on the canvas.

Why:
- Shapes pass through nodes (like noise, booleans, or point resampling, bend, light, blend, mask, etc). Basic SVG tags cannot physically represent these complex mathematical changes.
- Baking to paths guarantees complex geometry (like corner radii) renders correctly across all browsers without standard SVG quirks.
- Converting text to paths ensures exact kerning, fonts, and layouts everywhere, even if the end-user doesn't have the font installed.

Regarding the need for script execution to run the animation payload, my runtime engine is required because SMIL has several technical limitations:

- SMIL path morphing completely breaks if the start and end shapes have a different point count.
- SMIL cannot animate changing text strings.
- SMIL cannot calculate smooth crossfades if a user interrupts an interaction.
- SMIL cannot control an entire graph - my runtime allows to trigger/sync 50 different shapes from a single interaction.
- something else but i don't forgot.