currently, scarpet is the only thing akin to cotton scripting for 1.16 and newer, however, the inability to run them from datapacks leaves some possibilities out, especially if a datapack or mod uses scarpet scripts

Relates to the old gnembon/scarpet#17 and is duplicated by gnembon/scarpet#193.

As a workaround, if you have the script in the world/global folder already, you can run the load or run commands from the datapack, or do it the other way around, since if I understood correctly in the latest Carpet version you can load/create datapacks from apps, although not really easily, since you would have to load every JSON file in the datapack directly from the app.

Still a good suggestion though, imo.

you 'can' bundle scripts as carpet extensions and ship it as a mod. If would be sweet to have them run from datapacks, but that 'could' be a very involved process to get it working properly.
It would be nice to have though. I doubt it would be worth to work on it though