Ask HN: Inappropriate Uses of WebAssembly

Background: In July I attempted to pay my monthly electric bill through my utility's web portal. After logging-in I was greeted with a blank page. This was shortly after the CrowdStrike incident, and everybody has occasional downtime, so I didn't think too much of it. After a few days of blank pages I called their customer service. They denied any known outages, and with no technical support department I opted to pay my bill over the phone. Then I started digging into the problem and discovered they are using webassembly to apparently bootstrap their site code...in the interest of security (?), because I can't think of any other reason to add this abstraction to a site comprised of text and forms. This month I noticed one of my banks doing the very same thing. While I don't know webassembly, it was easy to see that both JS files are practically identical, suggesting a common source.

I am curious how widespread this practice is. For the purpose of my question, "inappropriate" is an implementation far outside the original use cases: games, CAD, sound editing, video editing, emulation, etc. I'm in the USA if that makes a difference, and had been browsing with webassembly turned off for quite some time. I am also curious if there is a "create a webassembly bootstrap version of my site" script out there somewhere?

URL's below.