The majority of the interest lies in the fact that Ryan Dahl[1] was the original creator of Node.JS[2], which is currently a very popular Javascript runtime and web backend.
Dahl released the initial version of Node.JS in 2009[3]. After a decade of experience working on Node.JS and growing the community, Dahl decided to create an alternative Javascript (and Typescript) runtime in mid/late 2018 called Deno which is now v1.0.
Just to nit-pick: Ryan Dahl had stepped away from node and the surrounding ecosystem in 2012. So for the vast majority of node's lifetime, he hasn't really been involved. Node in 2012 was a very different project.
(That doesn't take away from his observations or from the things that deno does differently. Just trying to reduce confusion.)