WASM has its moments, as you can see in this[1] benchmark it outperforms JS and native addons on certain tasks.

Since the bottleneck with native addons is usually data copying/marshalling, and we have direct access to WebAssembly memory from the JavaScript side, using WebAssembly on this "shared" memory might become the best approach for computationally heavy tasks. I wrote about it a bit here[2].

[1] https://github.com/zandaqo/iswasmfast

[2] https://medium.com/swlh/structurae-1-0-graphs-strings-and-we...

Yup wasm is the way to go as you can just distribute the wasm binary over npm and don't have to worry about further compile steps on the consumer side, but it's not always possible to use wasm.