Every time I've built a particle system for a web game, it ends up tied to whatever renderer I started with. Curves, emitters, color-over-life, texture atlases, all of it lives inside the plugin format of that specific engine. The moment the project needs to move, say Three.js to PixiJS, or to a custom canvas layer, the VFX doesn't come with it and I'm rebuilding effects from scratch.
What's worked for people here? I ended up separating the effect authoring from playback: design the effect visually, export it as a plain data file, then play it back with a small standalone runtime instead of baking it into the engine's own particle API. I built this into a tool called NixieFX mostly to solve my own problem, and it's helped, but I'm curious if others have landed on a different pattern, especially for AI-assisted projects where the underlying engine sometimes gets swapped out mid-project.