> its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous

I agree here, but

> Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of a game-changer.

If I'm starting a new project, Deno will be compelling if it means zero configuration with sufficiently sane defaults. It's like Rails vs Ruby. With Node.JS, you can pick and choose then configure things like TypeScript, but then you have to manage configuration files for TypeScript, linting, and all these things not relevant to the app code.