WebAssembly in the browser does feel great when you look at things like Pyodide/Pyolite, JupyterLite, xeus, webR and even small tools like texlyre – you get a full language/runtime locally with zero server, just WASM and some JS glue. The sad part is that VS Code for the Web never really became that kind of self-contained WASM IDE: the WASI story is focused on extensions and special cases, and running real toolchains (Emscripten, full Python, etc.) keeps breaking or depending on opaque backend magic. So right now the best “pure browser” experiences are these focused notebook/tool stacks, not the general-purpose web IDE people were hoping vscode.dev would become.