[mden]

There are good use cases for WASM in the browser where the js shim is transparently provided for you, e.g. for game engines that export to web. As for non-web use, I believe the wasm runtimes that exist generally don't require js shims.

Also even if you don't care about performance, WASM can arguably provide a sizable security benefit for a number of use cases such as not-fully trusted plugins.