> It promises a stable future, so let's say I'm being cautiously optimistic.

This doesn't make sense in light of your initial comment. One of the big goals of IO was to move to semver and address unpredictability/instability that you describe.

If anything, the merging of Node and IO should give you confidence that project governance will be on the right track moving forward.

Also, when you consider the advancements in transpiled js, the js/node community is looking very wise compared with other language maintainers.