> The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps.

Agreed and I’m personally glad progress on that hasn’t moved quickly. My biggest fear with WASM is that even the simplest web site would end up needing to download a multi MB Python runtime just because the author didn’t want to use JS!

The sad reality is that the slowness very often comes from the DOM, not from JavaScript. Don’t get me wrong, there could be improvements, e.g. VDOM diffing would be a cinch with tuples and records, but ultimately you have to interact with the DOM at some point.