Personally, I don’t think you’re being pedantic at all either because it seems to me that the web assembly stuff is less capable in comparison to things like MLIR. It also required and maybe still requires being hosted in a JavaScript runtime, i thought.
No longer does Wasm/WASI need JS host! There are many spec-compliant runtimes built for environments from tiny embedded systems up to beefy arm/x86 racks: