Java applets were terrible in all possible ways that something can be terrible and it took no less than Steve Jobs to kill off Flash.
This stuff was foundational to the modern web and it's clear the maintainers, who probably are not Steve Jobs, have no idea what will break as a result. If it's removed, it will just get added back in after the outrage
Outrage? In this economy? Are we watching the same movie?
(Anyway, my prediction is that likely they'll go with the WASM polyfill if they remove it ... but likely some folks will fight for some budget to keep it around behind some deprecation warnings and sandboxed for a while anyway.)
This stuff was foundational to the modern web and it's clear the maintainers, who probably are not Steve Jobs, have no idea what will break as a result. If it's removed, it will just get added back in after the outrage