> Then C# came and said
It's worse than that. The WASM GC standards team was warned in advance that the proposal wouldn't work for .NET, and they moved forward with it anyway:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77
They were also warned about Go (though I'm not sure if they ever actually consulted with golang devs):
https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/36
More links:
No interior pointers, no embedded arrays, and only a subset of Java definitely seems like an odd target. I would have expected at least two different full languages with acceptable porting overhead to be the MVP.
I believe the MVP was chosen specifically to have the same features as JavaScript, so that browser engines can implement it without major changes. So not really an odd target.