For anyone who was hoping this might result in some updates for PiAware, the good news is that in concert with wiedehopf my VRS database has been converted to json files and seems to be working fine.
I found some errors in the export and typos in my modified markers.js but the problems I had seem to have been caused by something else.
details here: https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/updating-local-db/53347