Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Overall reaction to the post

• Many readers see the piece as defensive “spin” and PR-driven rather than a substantive response to criticisms.
• The title and “we’re not dead” framing are viewed as risky: acknowledging the “demise” narrative makes some people more worried, not less.
• Several commenters note that concrete adoption numbers are vague (e.g., “doubled MAUs” without a baseline), which reduces confidence.

Node/npm compatibility and loss of original vision

• A recurring theme: Deno’s original appeal was a clean break from Node/npm—better standard library, URL imports, permissions, modern APIs, and a reset of dependency bloat.
• The later pivot to Node/npm compatibility is seen by some as abandoning that vision to reduce friction and satisfy investors.
• Critics say this:
  • Increases complexity and CLI/options surface.
  • Dilutes pressure to build “Deno-native” libraries.
  • Reintroduces the npm dependency tangle Deno was supposed to escape.
• Defenders argue the compat layer is optional, pragmatically enables migration, and expands Deno’s usefulness.

Deploy, KV, Fresh, and “momentum”

• Reduction of Deploy regions is widely read as a negative signal despite the explanation that “most apps don’t need to run everywhere.”
• KV staying in beta while a replacement is planned makes people reluctant to adopt it; some call it effectively dead.
• Fresh being refactored with a long-dated alpha timeline is interpreted as loss of focus; the removal of the “no build step” idea disappoints some.
• Overall, these moves fuel a perception of strategic drift and weak momentum.

VC funding, business model, and trust

• Multiple commenters won’t invest in Deno (or Bun) mainly because they’re VC-funded, fearing abrupt pivots or shutdowns.
• Others counter that monetizing hosted services while keeping the runtime FOSS is reasonable, and similar to other ecosystems.

Deno vs Node vs Bun and language/tooling debates

• Some prefer Bun for speed and Node compatibility; others distrust Bun’s crash-heavy, Zig-based implementation and praise Deno’s Rust codebase.
• Several argue there’s little incentive to move existing Node apps to Deno; Node is “boring but stable” with a huge ecosystem.
• Long subthreads debate TypeScript’s merits, shared types front/back, and whether one should just use Go, Java, C#, or other back-end stacks instead of chasing a better JS runtime.