nice, "run JS without (browser) runtime" is coming. perforr, jaws, or another project will eventually succeed.
A wasm runtime can be far more lightweight than node, not only because node itself is a wasm runtime, plus a lot of other things. Wasm could (or does, already?) occupy a sweet spot where platform independent extensibility is desired, but where that is not enough of a core feature to make inclusion of a heavier runtime advisable. Kind of like how Lua has its place, but with more focus on near-native speed and less focus on ad-hoc programming (aka scripting).