It couldn't get past a vote in the Wasm community group to advance from phase 1 to phase 2.

Here's a quote from the "requiem for stringref" article mentioned above:

> 1. WebAssembly is an instruction set, like AArch64 or x86. Strings are too high-level, and should be built on top, for example with (array i8).

> 2. The requirement to support fast WTF-16 code unit access will mean that we are effectively standardizing JavaScript strings.