Which were mostly tied down to specific languages and GC'd runtimes. You seem to have a big problem with Wasm just because bytecoode runtimes have been done before.
"The Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) in computing is a technology allowing common "shrink wrapped" binary application programs to be distributed for use on conformant Unix systems, translated to run on different underlying hardware platforms. ANDF was defined by the Open Software Foundation and was expected to be a "truly revolutionary technology that will significantly advance the cause of portability and open systems",[1] but it was never widely adopted."
"The Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) is a retargetable compiler suite and toolchain written by Andrew Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs, since 2005 maintained by David Given.[1] It has frontends for the following programming languages: C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC."
Furthermore, “I recognize this technology as a rehash of something that already exists” is just extremely uninteresting conversation without getting into the specifics. Clearly there are differences. Let’s talk about the merits and demerits of the thing.
The biggest advantage is non-technical: it has universal adoption in the browsers from early on, esp. on Apple devices. That was NOT an easy task to achieve. I do believe the previous attempt with asm.js was able to help there to ease the idea for the browser makers.
And technically it's quite well done. The only thing that is missing is thread support, but due to complexities I totally get why it wasn't done and it was a right call. There are workarounds and it will be added eventually, some forms of it exist already.
https://www.youtube.com/@wasmio
According to those, likely to replace containers and likely to be integreated in more and more systesms.
It seems like it's exploding in populartity and usage because it solves some very real problems.