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Just to be pedantic, ScummVM is a re-implementation of the original SCUMM, which totally was an instance of this approach. There is a (crazy long) Youtube video [1] where they take a peek at the SCUMM code for the first Monkey Island, and hack it almost on the fly. Pretty good for a 1990 game.

Of course, Infocom's Z-machine may be an even earlier example.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaqus5_QIg (the relevant bit starts at around 3:09:30)

Well, a (more) compact bytecode representation is one of the design decisions made for web assembly... That is one reason why it is a stack machine.

Bytecode in practice is almost always more compact than corresponding machine code.