...do you think that could actually work? I can't entirely tell if you're joking or not, it's true I never considered this... does WASM code have the network access that would be required for a proxy?

Looks like there is a project to transpile WASM w/ WASI APIs to portable C: https://github.com/turbolent/w2c2

Sadly it doesn't seem to support the networking parts of WASI, though. If it did, then it might even be possible to port all the way back to Cheetah

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of. Still, I wonder if the platform's networking could just be added in ex-post facto (disclaimer: never actually touched this, just looked at it)