There are some Rust front-end web frameworks that presumably manipulate the DOM, and in C++/Rust to pass a string to JS you need to run a TextDecoder over your WASM memory, so it's probably not a deal breaker.
But like... if you're writing a website, just use JavaScript.
C++/Rust use WASM linear memory, but this article is about reference types via WASM GC. UTF-8 data in an (array i8) or UTF-16 data in an (array i16) are opaque to the host.
Yeah, and you still have to marshal strings at the JS/WASM boundry, same as if you used (array i8/16) over JS strings in Java.
In the case of non-managed strings, this overhead hasn't been big enough to stop people from writing fairly fast (by Web standards) frontend frameworks in Rust.
