I agree that a lot of the tooling is still early days. There has also been a lot of churn as the wasm component spec has changed. We personally have a goal that in most cases web developers won't need to write WIT and can just use Web API's as if they were a library. But it's early days.

I am excited by the prospect of booting Wasm binaries without any JS glue, but when I've looked at the documentation for the component model and WIT it says that resources are references passed using a borrow checking model. That would be a serious downgrade compared to the GC-managed reference passing I can do today with Wasm GC. Do you know if there are any plans to resolve this mismatch?

The tooling has been in it's early days for a long time. As quickly as that can improve, so will the uptake. The technology itself is quite capable.