I think it's less "the Rust crowd is excited about wasm" and more as "there is a crowd which is excited about doing certain things with languages and software,

I think it's less "the Rust crowd is excited about wasm" and more as "there is a crowd which is excited about doing certain things with languages and software, and Rust and wasm are both exciting means for those ends." Perhaps a good approximation is, they're both tools for using high-level programming techniques with high performance for domains that were previously constrained in terms of what languages you could use.