While the parent is does seem to be treading into Poe's law territory, it's not entirely correct to dismiss that talk's relationship to wasm based on the dates

While the parent is does seem to be treading into Poe's law territory, it's not entirely correct to dismiss that talk's relationship to wasm based on the dates your quoting. Bernhardt in the talk explicitly mentions asm.js which is the precursor to wasm (it's even mentioned in the wikipedia article you skimmed a bit too quickly). asm.js was released Feburary 2013. I'm surprised HN has such a short memory, but the impetus for that talk was a clearly disturbing trend at the time implying that everything should be done in javascript. Node.js was gaining rapid popularity, people were discussing javascript as the new C for using as the language to write example code in, and while things like asm.js were exciting, they seemed to point towards the hilariously nightmarish future Bernhardt is discussing there.