>better opportunities for wasm than trying to oust JavaScript; that's not really a stated goal of the wasm project.
Yes, that's what the wasm guys say, however, what I think is that it will effectively displace Javascript. Not only that, the labor market implications for the current JS full stack developers and front-end developers will be interesting.
Its definitely meant to make javascript more capable. Currently while you can do some things with webaudio for example, with WASM you can use complex DSP, you can also build out valuable audio code that you want to keep locked down in binary format where someone getting your algorithm could do damage to your business but in the case of a webaudio DAW the code can't be run on the server.
Personally I think that’s a good thing, I don’t want front ends to get any more obfuscated than they have gotten.