Unlike @dlakelan, I think that’s a perfectly fine usecase for julia and is definitely part of the future development plan:
So I’d say I disagree that people looking at artifacts are not part of the target audience 
In the past 2-3 years, there were just much lower hanging fruit that got more attention because the first focus is the REPL. That’s not to say that there is noone compiling julia code to apps (PackageCompiler.jl is one such project), it “just” lacks the language support from a tooling perspective. There’s also an open position for a compiler engineer at juliacomputing, so my guess is that this part of julia development will pick up steam in the future.
I’m personally looking forward to the exciting future of standalone julia apps, which I think will really hammer home that julia is here to stay.