I think that's one of the things that confuses people. WASM is, in some respects, very similar to ASM. In other respects, it's very similar to a language VM, but has a name that makes that non-obvious. Will likely get more confusing as they add things that normal ASM doesn't do, like GC, direct JS call interop, more data types, etc.

I think that what actually confuses people is presenting WASM as something completely new, without even briefly discussing all the kinds of approaches to polyglot bytecode formats since the early 1960's.

So those not versed into the matter fail to understand the overall picture as it isn't given to them.