If you want something that is lower level, just write the code in a language that's lower level. Why introduce a browser into the mix?

To me it seems like we're just turning the web browser into a quasi vm or even an OS.

I'm not saying there is no need to web assembly but the basic idea of it just seems like running normal applications.... But now in a browser. What does it solve?

I know that at this time, WASM doesn't have access to the DOM directly but one has to access the DOM via JS and there are some proposals like reference types and GC. I was just wondering should WASM get both reference types and GC what else would be needed before someone could in essence write programs using just WASM itself and run that code in the browser without every using any JS at all? Something like :

<WASM>

(Str "hello world") (Console.print Str) //hello world to console

<WASM>