In my view, JS is preferable because you are forced to ship source to the client. This provides a beneficial atmosphere for learning and sharing solutions. Compiling to WASM, and front-end builds in general, take this critical and unique quality away from the web platform.

Rust-to-WASM is another attempt to abstract away the pain of JavaScript, attempts which began soon after the world discovered XHR. In fact Google released GWT specifically to appeal to Java devs who took one look at JS and said "no thanks".

This is not so say that there aren't legit uses for this technology - its a great way to port other software, like sqlite or linux into the browser. But as a way to make applications designed to run on the web?

I suggest that any dev that thinks this is necessary to have a good dev experience take the time to attempt to write a web app with just raw html, css, and js targeted at a modern browser. There's a lot of space there left to explore, I think, before labeling it as an unwieldy thing that must be wrapped in a safer abstraction to even think of touching.