Questions like this ignore the economics of minification. If you're a website and you have the option to ship a megabyte of unminified JavaScript or 150 KB of minified JavaScript, the minified JavaScript makes a ton of sense. Sure, gzip helps, but not all the way.
Same thing with WebAssembly: wishing WebAssembly didn't exist isn't going to make it go away. It exists because there is a real need for it: the need to securely and efficiently run high-performance C++ codebases in a web browser. Not everyone has this need, and not everyone will use it, but WebAssembly (and asm.js and Emscripten) solve a real problem for some people, and they simply cannot realistically target the web without this technology.
Same thing with WebAssembly: wishing WebAssembly didn't exist isn't going to make it go away. It exists because there is a real need for it: the need to securely and efficiently run high-performance C++ codebases in a web browser. Not everyone has this need, and not everyone will use it, but WebAssembly (and asm.js and Emscripten) solve a real problem for some people, and they simply cannot realistically target the web without this technology.