There's no point in creating a new VM, given that you can target almost everything by supporting JVM, CLR, BEAM, V8(JS transpiler) or LLVM/WASM for C-like languages. All you need is an optimized, general purpose IR that will be able to spit bytecode for each one of those and JS in the case of V8. To be fair, I don't think that a language like Kotlin will be able to accomplish this, it is just too complex. I believe that languages with small cores like Clojure with its monumental extension power through macros or Eff or Koka which "let you define advanced control abstractions, like exceptions, async/await, iterators, parsers, ambient state, or probabilistic programs, as a user library in a typed and composable way" such that it will fit runtimes. Like, provide the IR, the building blocks and let ecosystems develop. Some will argue that now you are moving the meaning of polyglot from the programming language to the libary-level, which is true, as seen in the Scala community, the divide between better-Java (Play), a different kind of OOP (Akka) a Haskell-like ecosystem (Typelevel) and an idiomatic Haskell-like ecosystem (ZIO). So you get Java, Erlang and different flavors of Haskell in one language which is Scala :). Many say that Scala is big and messy but in fact the ecosystems spawned by the core of the language made it like that. Scala's spec is smaller than Java's. I would argue that Scala is less complex than Kotlin, but this is highly opinionated.
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