That is how Mono started.
Additionally here is some historical refreshing about two other attempts,
https://www.gnu.org/software/dotgnu
https://www.codeguru.com/dotnet/net-nuts-bolts-the-joy-of-ro...
A surviving clone of the repo is available here,
https://github.com/SSCLI/sscli_20021101
Finally, this doesn't change the fact that the CLR was only yet another version of this idea, there are plenty of others since UNCOL in 1958.
I'm not saying it changes anything. Wasm is just a more modern attempt, like .NET itself. I don't see any reason to prefer one or the other only because of its age.
It is not like all those beautiful WASM implementations support the same set of features, from the paper standard,
Wasm is much newer than Mono was at the time. Let's wait.