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An example of this is Microsoft Flight Simulator. Packages such as aircraft are distributed/compiled as WASM modules and run (as I understand it) in a sandboxed environment within the simulator.

That’s the first use case that’s practical, in the wild, and adopted by Microsoft nonetheless.

Do you have any additional details/links on how this works?

From my limited understanding it’s actually the aircraft instruments that run JS/WASM .

https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Programming_Tools/WASM...

> WASM is basically a misnomer at this point.

Web standards/technologies are in wide use outside of browsers (via things like Electron), so you may find that the name makes more sense when viewed through that lens.

In your view, why does it not make sense? It certainly seems appealing as a universal runtime, and lives up to its claims as long as things like WASI get standardized.

It doesn't make much sense because if you want a universal runtime, JVM is a better choice.

That very much depends on what you need a runtime for. JVM bytecode semantics are not a good match for something like C++ or Rust.