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It's a meh deal.
They should've stuck with "this is crossplatform bytecode for the web", and it would've flourished there. Instead, now it's "designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications." [1]
Servers! Applications! Tigers! Lions! Oh my!
And it's not particularly good, or effective, or performant at any of those.
[1] https://webassembly.org
For me, the huge missing link (that is fortunately being worked on!) is being able to (in a performant way) have a good answer for "host code wants to do some blocking operation, WASM should suspend during the operation".
This _should_ be gotten thanks to work on stack switching in WASM. As of the most recent working group meeting on this [0], it seems like V8 has made a good amount of progress on this. They published a thing back in January[1] on this, and hopefully if things go well and this is available across WASM engines then there will be one less "JS-ism" (everything async) that causes issues for transpilation.
[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/stack/2023...
[1]: https://v8.dev/blog/jspi
It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.
https://github.com/makepad/makepad
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681
I think WASM will win. I've been using JavaScript for 25+ years, and I just wrote a SPA using Rust/WASM using the Leptos framework: https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos, and now I don't want to go back to JavaScript. Cargo is a superior package manager, with Cargo I might actually be able to let me my project sit for a year or two and go back and build to a working runtime without having to do a lot of dependency updates (good luck doing that with NPM). Rust has a solid type system, and with the borrow checker along with pattern exhaustive matching I can write something that I know is solid and will be difficult to break. There is no need to have multiple stages build pipeline running through Babel and Webpack which need to be properly configured; simply compile Rust to the WASM target and that is it. The WASM bundle is also likely to be smaller than a corresponding JavaScript bundle. Additionally, with Rust it is easier to do low-level stuff in the client efficiently such as feature extraction from image binaries. Also, the application I wrote with WASM is faster than a similar app I wrote in React, although I attribute that mostly to the fact that Leptos does not use a virtual DOM as React does.