[stult]

Also we have suffered a couple decades of JavaScript to give us that little extra motivation to make a common runtime environment work. And WASM is open source and thus not proprietary. And all the browsers (well, really, the one browser) are open source. The FOSS community is much more robust than it was 30 years ago, and there are many times more professional software devs floating around too, and security tooling and practices are substantially better now. Personally though I think the general antipathy for JavaScript and its endless parade of duplicative over hyped frameworks alone would suffice to push WASM forward.

[pjmlp]

And yet, most of the efforts are geared towards using it outside of the browser, where better alternatives to JavaScript have always been available.