You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.
It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.
You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.