[chrismorgan]

No one has made anything as capable as the DOM.

It’s excellent for documents, and very capable for apps. Games and other intensely custom-graphical interfaces are really the only situation where it’s not great, and in that case you can drop into a canvas and/or SVG (SVG admittedly still being DOM, but not HTML DOM) with no difficulty.

HTML was not initially designed for interactive applications, but for many years has progressively been.

The DOM gets you things like support for accessibility tech in a way that few other technologies can rival; the only real defect it has is that it strictly uses a push model and you can’t query the screen reader—so you can’t do things like tweak things for particular screen readers (for good or ill), or skip parts of the accessibility tree for efficiency based on where the tool is looking at present, but must present the entire accessibility tree up front. But although this is limiting, there are also reasons why it is so, around privacy and robustness.

WebAssembly never had anything at all to do with the DOM, let alone replacing it.