One potential future use could be as a better llvm bitcode. Bitcode isn’t portable but wasm is, and wasm has plans to be a much better platform for a variety of languages (eg with gc support and delimited continuations) whereas making gc compatible llvm code is basically impossible because you need to write the gc yourself but can’t control what’s in the registers or on the stack. Perhaps an optimised wasm compiler/runtime could be used to get a good compiler for a new language without doing as much work.

Or perhaps a general vm will never work as well as a custom one and the trade off won’t be worth it.