This is actually pretty compelling to me. I think the more support for freestanding wasm modules the better.
I'm working on a custom wasm app runtime and I don't want to have to implement the entire API surface of Emscripten or WASI. The new component model is even more complex. I wish there was more tooling available for using C/Rust stdlib functions for things like reading files or opening a socket, but being able to define your own API to handle the actually operations in the host/module interface.