[arxpoetica]

Speaking as a front-end-heavy developer (but someone who knows quite a lot about the back end too), the ideal of WebAssembly definitely excites, but the bridge to actually engaging with the technology is too cumbersome to actually do anything with it yet.

My take is two-fold. First, the tooling needs to mature. Second, a community of more hard-core developers (i.e., those who work regularly with C, C#, C++, etc.) needs to crop up.

Without those two things, I think you're right, it will never take off. But my bet is that both of those things happen; larger companies will at some point bank on it, and throw a bunch of tooling and development resources at it. Just a guess.