More like, "wasm is the new Emscripten". A much more formalized standard across all browsers. It goes to the same direction as LLVM but a far cry from that.
WebAssembly goes weeell beyond browser. It ensures consistent computation among all platforms including browser, desktop (linux/windows/osx), phone (android) and iot (ARM, others)... except iOS. It's closer to JVM than anything else but really it's already so much more universal than JVM which is mind blowing.