Hey, I know the feeling, I felt bad when I had my GPU just sitting there and it's just a little Vast server lol. If you want to use your hardware to run this software I'd be more than happy to help get it setup!
For what's it worth my approach has been running a tweaked whisper-asr-webservice[0] behind traefik behind Cloudflare. Traefik enables end to end SSL (with Cloudlare MITM, I know) and also helps put the brakes on a little so even legitimate traffic that makes it through Cloudflare gets handled optimally and gracefully. I could easily deploy your express + node code instead (and probably will anyway because I just like that approach more than python).
Right on, looking forward to it! Yeah I saw that module and was planning to use it but I just wrote up an Express/Node implementation first and never really looked back. But looking forward to collabing I will await your issues, cheers!
Anyway, I'll be making an issue soon!
[0] - https://github.com/ahmetoner/whisper-asr-webservice