While it's definitely interesting, I do wonder to what extent WASM threatens the open web even more than the DRM battles of the past, perhaps in non-obvious ways. I'm the past, one of the ways many a frontend dev has picked up tricks was simply by reading the JavaScript for a site they liked. That can be made harder by obfuscation but, even then, a prettyfier can make things generally intelligible.
That exchange of knowledge was possible because a) for all it's warts, JavaScript became the standard for everyone in the field and b) the only way to publish your work was to publish the source (at least a derivative). WASM blows away both of those assumptions and takes us in a direction more similar to desktop software, where you may have a copy of the binary but may not even (easily) determine which language it was written in.
That exchange of knowledge was possible because a) for all it's warts, JavaScript became the standard for everyone in the field and b) the only way to publish your work was to publish the source (at least a derivative). WASM blows away both of those assumptions and takes us in a direction more similar to desktop software, where you may have a copy of the binary but may not even (easily) determine which language it was written in.