Right, it necessarily affect much in terms of the way the program's functionality is written, but hardly irrelevant or a "red herring". The fact that any langua

Right, it necessarily affect much in terms of the way the program's functionality is written, but hardly irrelevant or a "red herring". The fact that any language can be compiled to a portable assembly language is important for the model we are discussing, because it isn't bound to local machine architecture. If a browser is simply a remote-program-sandbox, it is an important feature that remote programs are portable to the same degree web assembly is. Otherwise you'd have a remote app that people on ARM couldn't execute, and things of that nature. It also isn't strictly true what you say, that "anything useful" is achieved via APIs. There are a number of examples of native libraries being compiled to web assembly with varying degrees of success. Just because what you write is all API based doesn't make it universally true for all programs everywhere.