It is a waste of power (currently). But you can have native performance on a virtual machine by translating your VM code to machine code and just running the m

It is a waste of power (currently). But you can have native performance on a virtual machine by translating your VM code to machine code and just running the machine code. There are ways to sandbox without interpretation. WASM goes to some extent in that direction, but not all the way, mostly for safety. So it wastes some power. The question is: so what? WASM is attractive because it's an instant deployment. You open a URL, boom. Nothing to explicitly download, install and launch. Nothing to maintain. And eventually uninstall. It removes the friction for apps you use once in a while, or... just once, even. In engineering & design, efficiency comes in many kinds. You waste power on the user's machine, but you got your foot in the doorstep by them opening your URL and running your app. It's not how many of us, including me, want the world to be, but it... be how it be. P.S.: The real flip-side is when sites start figuring out ways en masse to profit from your compute by visiting their sites. Crypto mining as one example. Oh well.