I think the most useful definition is that a program representation is an intermediate representation if its primary raison d'etre is as a starting point for bu

I think the most useful definition is that a program representation is an intermediate representation if its primary raison d'etre is as a starting point for building other program representations. (We assume source code has dual purposes of being edited/reviewed and also as the starting point for later program representations, so human-edited source code wouldn't be considered intermediate. On the other hand, JavaScript used as an implementation detail for some high-level language compiled to WASM would be considered an intermediate representation.) In this case, if they didn't have an interpreter, they'd probably use an abstract syntax tree or control flow graph as their common source of truth for their two compilers. So, the primary reason the bytecode exists is to be interpreted by the interpreter and therefore isn't intermediate.