What do you mean by the Java direction? It's a virtual machine with GC support, so I guess in that regard it's similar to the JVM, CLR, BEAM, et al. If anything, those VMs show performance improvement and better GC over time and a strong track record of giving legacy software longevity. The place where things seem to fall apart over the long term is when you get to the GUI, which is arguably a problem with all software.

Java approach: create the JVM to support one language, so it has rich high-level concepts that are unfortunately skewed toward certain assumptions about language design, and it can be reused only for other languages that are similar enough.

WASM approach: start very low-level so C is definitely supported. Thus everything is supported, although every language has to roll its own high-level constructs. But over time more patterns can be standardised so languages can be interoperable within a polyglot WASM app.