The maintainer has a short explanation here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1098866#10
> The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.
Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.
> but several features in ntfy won't be available through debian packaging due to missing golang and nodejs packages
Woah. Shouldn’t Node and Golang be in Debian’s official repos by now?