Hundreds of hours? I'm sorry but if you truly needed that much time to find your way around an incredibly straightforward runtime that's on you. Skills for Deno, Node.js, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, browser-based JS and all the rest are like 99% transferable. If Deno doesn't work for you then use something else. It would probably be simpler to switch than writing all these aggressive blog posts.
Got shanghaied into TS-land right around Node 16 when they and TypeScript imposed mutually incompatible handling of ESM modules (that extensions mess).
Not only the type checker fail to understand of the kind of JS I had been shipping (and testing, and documenting, and communicating) up to that point; both the immediate toolchain, and people's whole pattern language around the toolset, were entirely broken as soon as you were doing anything different from the kind of React.js that later became Vercel.
Not only I was able to do 10% of what I was able to do previously conditional on jury-rigging the billion dollar stack to work, I also had a little cadre of happy campers on my ass blatantly gaslighting me that it is all, in fact, working; and suggesting the most inane "solutions" once I'd bent over backwards to demonstrate how there is, indeed, a problem of absurd dimensions, straight outta nowhere.
Later I met more such people. Same people who would insist JS runtimes are not trivially interchangeable, having committed to not examine what they're doing beyond a meager level of abstraction.
I see it as a rather perverse form of "working to spec" (have had to pick up surreal amounts of slack after such characters), but with incentives being what they are you get a cutthroat environment (such as the author of this blog post imagines to be living in), and from a cutthroat environment you get the LLMs eating everyone's breakfasts -- because no matter how yucky a word "synergy" is, synergizin' is that "fake open source" is designed to preclude, throughout the JS ecosystem.
"Fake open source" is how I call MIT/BSD licensed devtools and frameworks from hyperscalers that don't need to do an opencore rugpull because they're a piece of a long-term ecosystem strategy. They benefit from immense decade-long marketing and astroturfing efforts, lending them "default status" in the mindshare; and ultimately serve to carry the vendor's preferred version of reality into unrelated downstream projects. Which is why they often spectacularly fail to respond to the community's needs: they are built to preclude, past a certain point, the empowerment of implementors as a community.
Mastering some of that shit, now there was a sunk cost for me, but in modern JS land all these churning agglomerations play the role of "pay to play" gatekeepers. Considering what that's made the playing field be like, I'm happy pivoting to more niche technology just to keep away from said churning agglomerations.
Eventually the reference implementation gets good enough, and that is it.
In JavaScript case, the first error was to ignore compatibility with native addons and existing nodejs modules.
The second was not providing a business value why porting, with the pain of compatibility, one because "it feels better" doesn't release budgets in most companies.
Also not everyone gets it right, only because they got lucky once, history is full of one hit wonders.
Their initial baffling stance about package.json was the first bad sign. I almost can't imagine the hubris of expecting devs to abandon such a large eco-system of packages by not striving for 100% support out of the gate. Of course they had to relent, but honestly the damage was done. They chose ideology over practicality and that doesn't bode well with devs.
I think they saw Rust and thought that devs were willing to abandon C++ for a language that was more modern and secure. By touting these same benefits perhaps they were hoping for similar sentiment from the JavaScript community.
Deno has some really good ideas (e.g. the library KV interface). I agree with a lot (but not all) of Dahl's vision. But the whole thing is just a bit too quirky for me to invest anything critical into an ecosystem that is one funding round away from disappearing completely.
That would be much more sustainable than VC rat fucking the commons to make a buck while suckering in devs that were once good community stewards into dry husks that are only formed to generate profit.
Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to work for entire industries + professions around the world. Even better when there is a body of professionals working democratically to decide which people should be awarded the grants.
Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean others do.
Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably at least aiming.
Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy enough to get started that people don't really want to understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not have to think about it, many people tend to go that route, especially if VC-infested.
Thus platforms and SaaS products, seem to be the only way to make sustainable open source products.
I can't speak generally because it varies but is this really the case here? Other posters have commented on missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?