I guess between the original Node and the many alternatives that aren't Node (that I, a former PHP guy using Go for side projects, wish would gain more traction) there isn't enough of a niche for a "mostly like Node, but with fewer warts" project?
Partly yes, but I also I think more than expected Node has been able to fix a lot of the warts itself within the existing model, which really undermines the niche further.
I think it was more a question of what that niche was meant to be. Bun does alright in the "we don't want external dependencies" space of Node development. We switched a lot of our Go projects to it because it allows us to use nothing but Microsoft packages for Azure and Bun, similar to how we were using Go, but now we have a language less. Bun is largely a dropin for node though, and it would be rather easy to switch back.