Would Itanium have been better served with bytecode and a modern JIT? Also, doesn't RISC-V kinda get back on that VLIW track with macro-ops fusion, using a very basic instruction set and letting the compiler figure out the best way to order stuff to help target CPU make sense of it?
Those are all very different things. It is probably possible to argue that using a JIT would have solved some of Itanium's compilation issues, like it would make it easier to make compilation decisions about where to do software data miss handling, but I don't think it would have made the hardware fundamentally more sensible, or all that performant. RISC-V isn't really anything like VLIW, it is about as close to a traditional RISC as anything gets nowadays, and macro-op fusion is just a simple front end trick that doesn't overly influence whether the back end is in-order or out-of-order (or whatever else).
