Always Bet On Rust
An interview with Martin Kavík, creator of the MoonZoon full-stack framework
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Backend languages in the browser have been a thing for a long time. Google Web Toolkit would compile Java applications into JavaScript, and I believe (though I may be misremembering this1) that .NET had a feature where you could essentially code as if you were writing a form application in C# and it would compile to a web form and wire up JavaScript, HTML and CSS so you never had to learn anything about web technologies.
Things changed in a couple ways when Mozilla created asm.js (leading later to WebAssembly). Along with Emscripten, you could now compile C and C++ into a subset of JavaScript that executed very efficiently and provided the kind of linear memory model that C backends expect. Generated JavaScript can have pretty bad performance characteristics, so being able to take advantage of decades of research in optimizing compilers for C and C++ in the browser was a big step forward.