"promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language" is not how I see WASM
Unfortunately it kind of got branded this way for people who aren't close to the front-end industry. There's a segment out there who would like to write web apps but aren't willing to touch JavaScript with a ten-foot pole, and their hopes were gotten up that WASM would give them that. It's not exactly a lie, but it has so many asterisks that it may as well be.
In practice, the reality is that JS will continue to be the only first-class language for the web. WASM has many uses, some on the web and some outside of it, but the closer your app is to the DOM and to the browser as a platform, the less likely it is that you'll ever be able to pretend JS doesn't exist.
Blazor client-side (for dotnet) works fine with minimal asterisks, and even those issues are being slowly solved as WASM evolves with multithreading, GC, and DOM access.
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Unfortunately it kind of got branded this way for people who aren't close to the front-end industry. There's a segment out there who would like to write web apps but aren't willing to touch JavaScript with a ten-foot pole, and their hopes were gotten up that WASM would give them that. It's not exactly a lie, but it has so many asterisks that it may as well be.
In practice, the reality is that JS will continue to be the only first-class language for the web. WASM has many uses, some on the web and some outside of it, but the closer your app is to the DOM and to the browser as a platform, the less likely it is that you'll ever be able to pretend JS doesn't exist.
Blazor client-side (for dotnet) works fine with minimal asterisks, and even those issues are being slowly solved as WASM evolves with multithreading, GC, and DOM access.