Many of the build tools Javascript people use are written in Rust now. Some of them can be made to run in browsers, via WASM. React, the defacto UI framework for Javascript has a lot of web assembly components. A lot of the npm ecosystem has quietly brought in web assembly. And a lot of UI stuff gets packaged up as web components these days; some of that uses WASM as well.
If you pulled the plug on WASM, a lot would stop working and it would heavily impact much of the JS frontend world.
What hasn't caught on is modern UI frameworks that are native wasm. We have plenty of old ones that can be made to work via WASM but it's not the same thing. They are desktop UI toolkits running in a browser. The web is still stuck with CSS and DOM trees. And that's one of the areas where WASM is still a bit weak because it requires interfacing with the browser APIs via javascript. This is a fixable problem. But for now that's relatively slow and not very optimal.
Solutions are coming. But that's not going to happen overnight. But web frontend teams being able to substitute Javascript for something else is going to require more work. Mobile frontend developers cross compiling to web is becoming a thing though. Jetbrain's compose multiplatform is has native Android/IOS supported now with a canvas rendered web frontend supported in Beta currently.
You can actually drive the dom from WASM. There are some RUST frameworks. I've dabbled with using kotlin's wasm support to talk to browser dom APIs. It's not that hard. It's just that Rust is maybe not ideal (too low level/hard) for frontend work and a lot of languages lack frameworks that target low level browser APIs. That's going to take years to fix. But a lot compiles to wasm at this point. And you kind of have access to most of the browser APIs when you do. Even if there is a little performance penalty.
> React, the defacto UI framework for Javascript has a lot of web assembly components.
I'm pretty sure this is just plain false. Do you have an exemple?
I think you're confusing CLI tools for React with web components.