My bad, I read about these too quickly. Still, unless you are in the CLI ecosystem, these are not very compelling propositions. WebAssembly is a response to the shortcomings of previous iterations of the universal bytecode idea.
WASM exists mostly for political reasons as far as I can tell: it's something people who work on browsers can "own", vs outsource to other older teams with more historical baggage and different backing corporations. I mean, for WASM to be technically compelling you have to buy the idea that the best way to move the web forward is to enable applets-written-in-C without any useful form of DOM interop or GUI. That seems like a rather implausible claim.
As for embedding a JVM, sure, why not? Good JVMs are open source these days and HotSpot starts in 50 msec or less. V8 is very comparable, tech wise in terms of its approach. Lots of code out there targets JVM bytecode.
There are very good technical reasons for WASMs existence. JVM-Bytecode for example is very Java-focused, WASM doesn't need class-files or many bytecodes like invokevirtual. For supporting C++/Rust it doesn't even need GC.
Bringing large applications like PSDFKit, AutoCAD or games into the browser is certainly getting the web forward. Sure, WASM isn't intended for manipulating the DOM. This is still JS's job (at least for the foreseeable future).