I have always wanted Deno to succeed. But it just seems to be too full of contradictions.

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.