> Is the goal to be able to write applications in programming languages that aren't javascript or (transpiled to javascript)? Does that include writing the parts that interact with the browser's DOM presentation layer? I think my understanding is that you can't actually do that?

WasmGC, which is the proposal under current discussion, is one of the biggest steps towards that. You can't safely interact with the DOM if you can't pin references to the DOM. You can't pin references to the DOM if you can't let the JS VM garbage collect you (or otherwise understand your garbage collection needs).

(One of the demos mentioned in the article shows Dart/Flutter driving what seems to be a lot of DOM via GC pointers. I haven't dug in far enough to see exactly what the balance is between JS and Dart there, but it should be a lot closer than previous demos.)