Yes, that's what I was implying. Industry has been repeating the mantra of developer time being worth more than machine time for so long. Indeed, it's true, but far too many people forget that it's a trade off, and that machine time is still valuable. You can't just cut developer time at any expense. That's how we end up with phones that last 4 hours between charges and a vicious cycle of throwing hardware in the trash because lazy developers made it obsolete.

Yet in real life use, WebGL apps suffer from spending too much time on the JS layer (for physics, instructions, etc), so they get a lot of overhead over pure OpenGL.

WebAssembly might indeed solve this...