I decided to split the difference, by leaving in the gates, but fusing off the functionality. That way, if I was right about Itanium and what AMD would do, Intel could very quickly get back in the game with x86. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what did happen.
I'm sure he got a massive bonus for this decision, when all the suits realized he was right and he'd saved their asses. /s
The biggest hole in WASM right now is being able to DO anything really useful in it, natively. The only thing you can do natively right now is use the CPU. Can't manipulate the DOM. Can't access local storage or cookies or networking APIs, etc. You can call out to arbitrary JS code, but that's it.
This is great for some of the big JS libraries that have very CPU-heavy workloads they can optimize in WASM and call to from JS. Like frequently parsing and re-parsing HTML. Or doing game physics calculations.
I haven't heard word one about WHEN any of this will be available. Which is particularly troubling, given how long people have been begging for it.
Of course, none of this stops you from using WASM in the real world, to do quite a lot of things. You're just gonna have to deal with JS interop, still, do do anything really useful.