Yeah it's a pistol round but big enough for whitetails.
Audie Murphy carried one.
I've seen a video of an M1 Carbine rebuilt with a custom .357 barrel. It seemed to be an early proof-of-concept test, not fully sorted out. It did seem functional, though.
The wildcat cartridge that should've been developed for the carbine back in the '60s was a critter known as the .30 Kurz - basically a necked-down version of the German Stg-44 cartridge. The 8mm Kurz is the same length as the .30 Carbine cartridge, so magazines would be adaptable. By forming the brass to fit a .30 caliber projectile, the carbine barrels could simply have the chambers reamed to take the bottleneck cartridge.
I suspect that there were pressure problems with that conversion, which is a shame. Had that worked, it might've changed the course of military planning away from the 5.56.