Thanks for the article.

I would like to add another point of view: using emscripten is it possible to port to the browser open source C/C++ projects. I made this website: https://www.minuteimage.com/ which optimizes images using mozjpeg wasm porting. If you look to online image compressor, you will see that almost all of them send images to their server… which is not needed anymore (unless they want to use your image).
The point is: performance boost is good, but being able to port existing algorithms to the browser is even better!

If gimp was written today, it probably could have been a web app!