I've been working on making a base or skeleton game engine for when I participate in Itch.io game jams that compiles from C++ to web assembly using Emscripten.

I've been working on making a base or skeleton game engine for when I participate in Itch.io game jams that compiles from C++ to web assembly using Emscripten. It's exactly as you say no one wants to download and run an unknown binary blob; this severely limits how many people will try your game. I'm alternately impressed that I can port C++ in this way at all, and sad at the state of the tooling still after so long. When something goes wrong with the web assembly version of the project, I can't debug it from first principles. This could be because, as an embedded and C++ programmer, I'm unfamiliar with Javascript debugging tools, but it's still unfortunate I can't single step through at the C++ source code level when debugging the web assembly build. I just want gdb for web assembly. I've also run into silly/stupid bugs like keyboard input not working only in fullscreen, except if you leave it on overnight in which case 1 out of N tries the keyboard input comes back. I spent days trying to debug this, only to have someone on a forum answer it in about 2 seconds that it's because a Firefox change now causes keyboard input to be captured by the awesome bar during fullscreen (which of course you can't see). I could have tried this for a million years to figure out what was wrong and not had that insight. It doesn't bode well for my game engine project if things are this fragile; no other C++ compilation target is this janky.