Jarred's been working on bun for over a year. I don't get the sense that it's a reaction to anything recent at all, Jarred is just super passionate about building the best JavaScript runtime.
The fact that this project uses Zig suggests to me the developer is talented , passionate, and willing to challenge the status quo.
When you choose a lesser known language like that to tackle a hard problem, chances are you are confident in yourself and the language.
The problems I pointed out with the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole is that it’s low hanging fruit. It’s not that there aren’t financial opportunities elsewhere, outside JavaScript. There definitely is. But the perception of financial incentives is the low hanging fruit, plus high reward.
In this case, it will boil down to how much Bun innovates versus just being a thin wrapped around existing solutions. And again, I don’t doubt this. Skeptical, in general, but not ruling Bun out.