This is what I was going to ask as well. The only benefit I can see to this is that they are trying future proof for when WebAssembly or some other back end is

This is what I was going to ask as well. The only benefit I can see to this is that they are trying future proof for when WebAssembly or some other back end is more prevalent? Maybe they want to do Glimmer-Native? Handlebars -> JS/TypeScript compiler -> Bytecode -> JS probably anyway -> HTML seems like a lot of work.