That was the original message used to sell WebAssembly, however when the real goal is to replace ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight and PNaCL it was obvious that it would grew beyond that.

really? i thought it's purpose was to take us back to the good old days of sellable proprietary binary blobs instead of the more open HTML/JS/CSS stack.

that's not how I remember it:

https://brendaneich.com/2015/06/from-asm-js-to-webassembly/

edit: from the linked article, in case it isn't clear, an HN comment by eich:

"Sure, in userland many languages compile to assembly. Hmm, where have I heard that word lately?"[1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554914