The base argument here doesn't make sense. WASM requires an interpreter which must be native. The argument is that this interpreter can be smarter about what

The base argument here doesn't make sense. WASM requires an interpreter which must be native. The argument is that this interpreter can be smarter about what crosses OS security rings. But those same improvements could be done in the native compiler or interpreter. The next argument could be that many things using the WASM target would focus more effort on improving it so all WASM targets benefit outpacing their individual optimizations. This one is harder to dismiss outright, but instead of optimizing for machine code you are now optimizing your WASM output. Also this intermediate byte code representation already exists for both LLVM and JVM, which many languages target. It is difficult to see WASM magically improving performance at all and especially not dramatically enough to encourage people to switch to it for that reasoning.