The difference between having, say, C++ code where the variable names are scrambled versus having assembly seems vastly different to me. And that parallel seems 100% accurate here. JS may be minified but you still are reading the cide that was written, where-as no one seriously authors wasm; it's a lower level (virtual) machine.
And it's worse. Because wasm is a separate process, so now there's multiple things to debug & learn. Tools like wasm-bindgen generate complex glue code to bridge wasm and the host/js side. The wasm-verse brings a ton of new challenges to legibility.
Learning minified bundled js codebases can be daunting at first, but it's ultimately js, most often built with normal-ish stacks, and the code usually shows it's nature pretty quickly after setting some DOM event breakpoints. It's nowhere near the joy of view source, but it's not bad.
Notably Chrome m111 just turned on pretty printing by default, so the first couple milliseconds of opening the debugger should be significantly less overwhelming. You used to have to know to press the prettify button.
And it's worse. Because wasm is a separate process, so now there's multiple things to debug & learn. Tools like wasm-bindgen generate complex glue code to bridge wasm and the host/js side. The wasm-verse brings a ton of new challenges to legibility.
Learning minified bundled js codebases can be daunting at first, but it's ultimately js, most often built with normal-ish stacks, and the code usually shows it's nature pretty quickly after setting some DOM event breakpoints. It's nowhere near the joy of view source, but it's not bad.
Notably Chrome m111 just turned on pretty printing by default, so the first couple milliseconds of opening the debugger should be significantly less overwhelming. You used to have to know to press the prettify button.