Wait a minute... we've had virtual machines (in the programming language sense) in like forever. JVM, BEAM, CRL, etc. None of them made containers obsolete. People package Java inside containers even though Java has had non-Linux-container ways to package things in like forever — because people like the tooling surrounding Linux containers.

WASM just replaces JVM/BEAM/CLR/etc with its own virtual machine. It doesn't address all the stuff that container orchestration tools address such as lifecycle management, update management, artifact management, autoscaling, networking, management access control, logging & metrics, etc.

If you want to start faster than containers, you already can — by not using containers.

So given all this above, how is "starts faster than containers" an advantage?

And containers are not exactly slow to start. `time docker run -ti --rm ubuntu:20.04 true` => 0.5s. I suppose that's too slow for serverless cold start, but if you really care about that then the startup time of Ruby, Python, Node.js etc with all the packaged dependencies are also in that order.