In that case, it came from Mozilla for working on a web browser, with primary goals of security, building sandboxes & language runtimes (js), and replacing an application-level cross-platform C++ core.

Which is very different than "web people", which in my mind implies webdev -- html/css/js + API server/db/caching backend.

Which also further explains why WASM is so far along (sandbox, security), much better than any association with webdev itself; but not kernel-level system development. (But if the web browser is an userspace OS... then it's probably not that far from it)