I've also noticed a number of fun WASM projects this year. I think the underlying WASM features that enable all this have been around for a while, so the breakthroughs are probably coming from the community and ecosystem growing incrementally and synergistically, building on each other's work and collaborating.
It does have a similar feel to how things went when DHTML was becoming The Thing. People would share increasingly elaborate demos that built on older stuff until there were whole web applications. Then AJAX happened and it was all over. It seems like WASM is finally fulfilling all those early fantasies of the browser as the operating system.
I believe they are coming from people wanting to push people to get confortable with running binary blobs in their browsers so they can suck up all that juicy personal information leaked by browsers.
WASM is unnecessary and unsuitable for such a purpose, since it would need to go through JavaScript to get that information anyway. It's far more sandboxed than JS, and cannot get any more personal data than JS can already.
