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).
Even as a big Deno "hater" due to their anti-package manager stance on the basis of URLs that leads to a sleuth of dependency attacks, I must say that Deno and the people behind it have undoubtedly pushed the space forward on many aspects!
I've been using Deno a lot for straight shell scripting. Being able to link directly to dependencies and run without a separate install step or node_modules directory is huge. The fact that it's a single binary download and can self update is so nice too.
I'm not sure if these features are similar for Bun or not. I'm just sad about the whole thing.
Dodo aims to be a drop-in replacement.
Then there's Ende, my fork, and I ripped out Node compatibility, Deploy, KV, Jupyter, &c. https://ende.sh
It is also a single self-contained binary and has a self-updater.
You are added to the list of projects I thought would really become essential to my work but slowly faded away. Another one, for example is rethinkdb.
At least Deno actually caused some movement in the node world, just like io.js.
Well, Bun is surprisingly better and convenient than before
Bun and Deno are now big-tech dependent. For the better, and the worse.
Well, Bun is surprisingly better than before
Fundamentally, there is a big sect of the JavaScript ecosystem / culture that is hype-driven and has extreme churn. Jumping to every new framework and runtime without thought for the long-term, or any regard for historical patterns.
This stuff keeps happening. Somehow I'd love to get through to the perpetuators of the JS hype treadmill that they're only hurting themselves and making themselves look foolish when the churn inevitably hurts them and the wider ecosystem.
But maybe they jumped to the next shiny thing after Deno before Demo's demise was announced, and they'll learn nothing.