Reminds me a bit of efforts like C--, which sought to seek a simpler pseudo-assembly used as some kind of intermediate language for compilers. But those efforts never gained much traction, whereas I think that some transpilers actually exploited a few features beyond even normal, full-fleged C -- namely GCC extensions -- to make some features easier and/or faster (it's been a while, but it was probably some trampolining optimization).

Let's see how it turns out.

As for something completely different, I've always wondered how it would be to program a webapp in a rather different language than JS -- most transpiled languages aren't that fundamentally different from JS. And Emscripten seems mostly used to port some code that "runs in a box". Wonder how far one could come doing some stereotypically Web 2.0 things in e.g. Pascal.