Well, unlike Java, Wasm is not the product of a for-profit company. It's a W3C standard that actually does solve many problems most people didn't realize they had. It essentially obsoletes virtualization (CTO of Docker famously said "If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created [sic] Docker. That's how important it is"). It will allow the creation of a unified software ecosystem across languages (Wasm "components" are designed to allow you to e.g. import numpy into a JavaScript project. See https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...). The virtual machine is designed from the ground up to make many types of vulnerabilities, such a stack smashing, impossible. And, as an open standard, it's not beholden to the whims and lawyers of Oracle.
I'm not 100% certain the W3C working group won't end up fumbling it, but if you're not excited about wasm then you probably just don't know much about it.
The founders know very clearly what preceded it as they're working with the authors of these previous attempts (JVM, CLR, etc) to integrate their stacks with Wasm.
Oracle was the company that completely open-sourced OpenJDK and even their own paid support JDK is just a minor modification of the former. Java and the JVM is also among the few languages/platforms with separate specifications, and multiple completely independent implementations.
If anything, Java is a much much safer bet than the oligopoly of WebKit/Blink.
I'm not 100% certain the W3C working group won't end up fumbling it, but if you're not excited about wasm then you probably just don't know much about it.