is this proposal dead?

[pannous]

I think chrome stopped experimental support for the string ref proposal(?)
Does it have any future?

[jakobkummerow]

The Community Group decided to go with the JS String Builtins proposal for now. That one is specific to browsers (or more accurately: JavaScript embeddings of Wasm) though; it remains to be seen how opinions shift when people start wanting to run Wasm modules compiled from Java/Kotlin/Dart/etc in other environments.

Chrome's implementation of this proposal continues to be available behind the --experimental-wasm-stringref flag. We currently have no plans to drop the implementation. That said, given the lack of progress of this proposal in the Community Group, we're currently also not investing into it; and in the long run we'd want to either see it make progress or drop it eventually.