Whenever technology changes there's always an argument against the new thing.
In this case, I don't think that argument has merit. We've been running various flavors of compiled code since (almost) the beginning of computers, and the merits and drawbacks of that approach are well understood.
I don't think your argument has merit, that merits can be ignored because this is how computers always used to be. Wasm's return to the dark times of industrialized blackbox computing will cut off the best users from the joy of being closer to the machine that they had on the web, and that return to darkness is a sad plight for mankind, even if that's how it always used to be. I treasure the light of the open alive web, and hope somehow it can survive this voyage into shadow.
Text formats can be minified and obfuscated, binary formats can include mechanisms to see and experiment with the source. It's all about the tooling you have, what that tooling makes easy, and what it makes hard.
Does that Whataboutism wet blanket mean it should be that way? Does it mean we should make the situation even more infernal and bad?