So says the marketing, usually pushed by those with an agenda with WebAssembly, forgetting about all those that trace back to the early 1960's and mainframe language environments with capabilities.
Lets sell old stuff as something new, never done before, rewriting history.
More recent chapter, application servers with WebAssembly, what a great idea!
I really don't think anybody is forgetting anything since people like you keep writing about it in every Wasm discussion thread since at least 2015. At this point, literally everybody involved with Wasm knows.
And people have seen what was in the past and created a modern, well-composed solution that is accepted by all major players. Excellent if you ask me. Yeah nobody has invented a new wheel here - but that's not necessary, actually it might be counter-productive to the goals of Wasm. Wasm wants to take stable, well-known ideas, improve upon the warts of previous tech like CLR and JVM and put it on 100 billion devices.