This is basically what is happening with wasm and it's happening much faster Gary Bernhardt was anticipating in that presentation.

IMHO wasm finally displaces javascript as the only practical language to run stuff in a browser. Frontend stuff happens in javascript primarily because browsers cannot run anything else now that plugins have been killed off. Wasm changes that.

At the same time a lot of desktop apps are in fact javascript apps running on top of electron/chrome. Anything like that can also run wasm.

Finally people have been porting vms to javascript for pretty much as long as wasm and its predecessors have been around. So booting a vm that runs windows 95 or linux in a browser is not very practical but was shown to work years ago. This is what probably inspired the presentation above.

I've actually been pondering doing some frontend stuff in kotlin in or rust. I'm a backend guy and I just never had any patience for javascript. I find working in it to be an exercise in frustration. But I actually did some UI work in Java back in the day (swing and applets). Also there's a huge potential for stuff like webgl, webvr, etc. to be driven using languages more suitable to building performance critical software if they can target wasm. I think wasm is going to be a key enabler for that.

Most of the stuff relevant for this has been rolling out in the last few years. E.g. webgl is now supported in most browsers. Webvr is getting there as well. Wasm support has been rolled out as well. Unity has been targeting html5 + wasm for a while now. And one of the first things that Mozilla demoed years ago with wasm was Unreal running in a browser.

I would not be surprised to see some of this stuff showing up in OSes like fuchsia (if and when that ships) or chrome os.