WASM certainly had the potential for this, but I am afraid without direct DOM access it is never going to happen.

It is happening. Leptos is an example: https://www.leptos.dev/

Dioxus is another: https://dioxuslabs.com/

C# with Avalonia for a different use case: https://avaloniaui.net/

Avalonia solitaire demo: https://solitaire.xaml.live/

Avalonia Visual Basic 6 clone: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/

Blazor can run as WebAssembly on the client side if you choose that runtime mode: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...

Beyond the browser, Wasmer does WebAssembly on the serverside: https://wasmer.io/

Fermyon too: https://www.fermyon.com/

Extism is a framework for an application to support WebAssembly plugins: https://extism.org/

Btw there is also Dominator: https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator

how'd you compare dioxus and leptos?

If you're familiar with JS frameworks, you can think of it like this:

Dioxus : React :: Leptos : SolidJS

The key for me is that Leptos leans into a JSX-like templating syntax as opposed to Dioxus's H-like function calls. So, Leptos is a bit more readable in my opinion, but that probably stems from my web dev background.

The Dioxus README has a whole section comparing them -- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus#dioxus-vs-leptos

Not parent but GP: Love Leptos, I think they are on the right track. Dioxus is good too, I think it has wider scope and they also obtained funding from external sources while Leptos is completely volunteer based.