My complaint is not with Deno APIs. From what I’ve seen they’re great. My problem arrives the moment you install a dependency, because it isn’t using Deno APIs. And digging into exactly what any dependency is doing is often an odyssey through transpiled-to-ES3 JavaScript, outdated APIs and so on.

The original promise of Deno was a consistent ecosystem. Absent that it doesn’t matter to me all that much how great Deno is within itself, the case for using it simply isn’t compelling enough. These days the newer, standards-compliant Node APIs are pretty good too!

Surely you can choose to only install "Deno native" dependencies?

It may sometimes be difficult to find such an option, but that was always going to be the case without Node compatibility.

Now, in theory at least, you have the option of sticking with Deno native dependencies, and an escape hatch when none are available.

That seems like the most pragmatic solution to the ideology vs adoption dilemma.