I agree, but at the same time I look at the Webassembly web page, and they explicitly state that replacing Javascript is not their objective. Why is that?
So WASM is a great tool, but not a good choice for building something like HN, where perf isn't an issue. Iteration speed, debuggability, and the GC make HTML/CSS/JS a better choice here.
It seems to me that the history of computing so far can be summarized as "due to popular demand, things have been used far outside their creator's intended scope, with 3-4 non-horrible results".
(Lisp is definitely one, can't think of another on the top of my head).
We could have had Lisp instead of JS, but no, that would have worked too well; management wants Java. We almost had a Scheme instead of CSS: DSSSL, which could also do structural transformations of the document tree. But once again, no. The simplicity multiplied by the flexibility of a Lisp, equaled unacceptable complexity, for some strange definition of complexity.
XML looks like it really, really wanted to be a Lisp, what with its orderly nesting of tags. I almost wonder if XML stumbled and fell, due to the supporting pillars of parens being knocked out or corrupted, left, right and center.
Better to develop something for "performance" that just happens to be able to replace JS as a side benefit. Makes it a lot easier to swallow