Deno 2.8.0 is out. The compatibility work is real: the #Node.js test suite pass rate jumped from 42% to 76.4%, deno install is now a drop-in for npm install, lib.node is included by default, and setTimeout() now returns a NodeJS.Timeout instead of a number. None of that is irrational on its own. Put it together, though, and #Deno starts looking less like an alternative to Node.js and more like a cleaner way to run Node.js-shaped code.

It reminds me of OS/2's Win32 compatibility layer. IBM offered it so developers wouldn't have to choose, but the effect was the opposite: people kept writing Windows apps, and OS/2-native software never got a reason to exist. The closer Deno gets to Node.js, the less reason anyone has to think about whether their code is Deno-aware. Maybe that helps adoption. I just don't see how a Deno-native package culture survives if the winning path is “pretend it's npm.”