alt Hacker News> with a bunch of stuff renamed
And a capability system and a brand new IDL, although I'm not sure who the target audience is...
> it's basically just regular assembly language
This doesn't affect your point at all, but it's much closer to a high-level language than to regular assembly language, isn't it? Nonaddressable, automatically managed stack, mandatorily structured control flow, local variables instead of registers, etc.
Some hardware in the past has had a hidden/cpu managed stack. Modern CPUs with features like CFG have mandatorily structured control flow. Using a stack machine instead of a register machine is indeed a key difference but the actual CPU is a register machine so that just means WASM has to be converted first, hence the JIT. Stack based assembly languages are still assembly languages.