Comment by xscott

I don't disagree or really have a dog in the fight for three out of your four points, but it's unfortunate that WASM gets such a bad rap. The blobs are large because popular compilers force the semantics of popular languages into the Turing tar pit. WASM binaries are pretty compact by design:

    const binary = Uint8Array.fromBase64(
        "AGFzbQEAAAABBgFgAX8BfwMCAQAHBgECeDIAAAoJAQcAIABBAmwL"
    );
    const module = new WebAssembly.Module(binary);
    const instance = new WebAssembly.Instance(module, {});
    console.log(instance.exports.x2(3));

This is a trivial and useless example at 39 bytes, but a real example could be more compact than comparable minified JavaScript.