This is a pretty big deal if something as impactful as WASI is being run as shadily as described. Given my own personal experience with similar standards body politics and the details provided, I am (unfortunately) prone to believe it.
It's 100% obvious clear & true that WASI has ignored literally everything that has ever happened on the web & built entirely novel specifications. This is uncontestable. I'd never really thought of this before, but it's clear & true.
The WASI group seems to have no outreach, no attempt to influence or shape actual web specifications. There's zero obvious interactions on modern hotbed topics like File System Acccess APIs. They're happy making their own specifications that are "webassembly" but decidedly free of any influence or incidence or compliance or compatibility with anything else at all web/web-platform. It's a kind of scary path, and I hadn't really considered that before.
I'd been very much a fan of everything happening, and I think there is some (vast) room for independent innovation. I also would note that some of the authors here are a bit high drama (they used heavyhanded tactics to not just ask for but to demand UTF-16 support, in very strident tones. Mentioned when I cited this link earlier today, [1].)
It's a long jump, but this ties back to PWA's & the success of the web in general; there's a kind of sad temerity, enforced by a lot of negative attitudes & won't do restrictive implementers (see: browser choice matters[2]) & general naysayership that keeps implementations & ambitions on the web small & low (see also my opinion on "Why haven't PWAs haven't killed native apps yet", [3]). The web is dogged by hostile negative forces that dislike & want to keep it slow & low. That WASI wants nothing to do with the web, only & has zero places it's tried to work with the web & it's standards bodies is unsurprising, because there are so many latent highly-conservative, highly restrictive forces & voices. Being independent & uncoupled feels sensible; change from the outside, become the better world yourself, then maybe as you rise above commit down into the dirty slow dogged world of web standards, where half the people here hate progress & hate doing things & hate expanding capabilities on the web.
