I was interested in Deno from the start. It has a few very nice features. Notably the sandboxing model, native Typescript support and browser based API surface.

But I also was quite skeptical of their dependency model with plain url imports.

With the current implementation you end up with a half-baked import map that's essentially a poor mans package.json, but without any of the tooling that you'd expect. (like npm upgrade, npm outdated)

It recently dawned on me what they are going for: a "cloud native" computing platform that doesn't require builds and packaging. Targeting both Javascript and WASM.

I do believe there is quite a lot of promise in the project. The tooling can improve. It'll be interesting how things evolve.