I don't disagree that we're moving further and further away from the documents with links model, but that ship has long past sailed. It wasn't just ActiveX, it was Flash. And Java. And Silverlight. And EME. And JavaScript (which, despite the presence of "Script" in the name is not just a scripting language).
Web browsers are currently (to take a reductionist view) just VMs with the ability to also view traditional HTML pages. Java had the right idea with its run-anywhere code and the JVM; it was just a bit too early to the party, and didn't have an HTML viewer to get its foot in the door.
Java is a bad language, bad design, and bad execution.
Having more of Java in JavaScript is bad. Turning browser into a VM is just a recipe to bring pretty much every problem inherent to VMs to web development
Web browsers are currently (to take a reductionist view) just VMs with the ability to also view traditional HTML pages. Java had the right idea with its run-anywhere code and the JVM; it was just a bit too early to the party, and didn't have an HTML viewer to get its foot in the door.