WebAssembly IS strongly typed, and that property DOES help it to generate machine code right away. Heck, even its if statements and loops have types associated with them, and those types can help compilation from a stack machine to a register machine. The article even mentions a concrete reason later down, that deopts because a type passed to a function changed can't happen in webassembly like it can in JIT compiled JS.

And indeed, this article does seem to be worth my time.