> Deno 1.0 shipped in 2020 on the original terms, & then spent the next four years walking them back one piece at a time. First the deps.ts convention, one file that re-exported every URL: a manifest in all but name. Then lock.json, an integrity hash per URL: a lockfile. Then import maps, so you could write bare specifiers again.

I object to two of these categorisations.

deps.ts was a convention, not a built-in runtime feature. If you want to follow the convention, that's fine. It's just a regular old typescript file!

Import maps were not Deno walking back, but implementing a web platform feature. Parity with browser JS was a standout feature of Deno from the beginning. This was walking forwards if anything.

However, broadly, the story is indeed one of Deno moving away from its opinionated roots towards pragmatism (drop-in replacement for Node).