Good questions. WASM at this point seems more a locus of JS hate than anything practical. To create something cool, novel, and useful should be the goal, not avoid or use a certain language.
In my experience in SF I encounter many never-JSers. Being a JS fan, for certain things, I don't get the hate. So maybe I feel threatened in a way, but I'm not going around wishing for the death of python or Haskell. That's all. I am reading random internet commenters and getting slightly upset. That's on me.
I can't imagine JS will go anywhere anytime soon, especially since it still needs to be called from DOM manipulation,but the ability to code a full stack in a single non-JS language and run it at near-native performance is going to be very useful as more apps become web based and complex. Even from a skills point of view, you can now have backend and front-end developers skillsets are slightly more merged so easier to swap around resources.
Think about how you would do ML with just python. That’d be insane. And thankfully the packages you need are implemented in c or cuda with python bindings. 99% of ml people never see the insides of np, sklearn or tf. But you’re glad these aren’t implemented in python.
Similarly, you’re glad for webgl if you need to do lots of parallelizable computations (cfd, ml, 3d). But glsl was never bashing at js. Just that using js for these task isnt feasible.
Similarly, now you can use fast code from js. Essentially, you have a bunch of matrices use webgl, otherwise wasm. And orchestrate everything from js. Like ml peeps do with python, c and cuda.
For the better or the worse...