Why didn't Deno take off?
spencerpauly.com
spencerpauly.com
Personally I think realms will change the game, there's probably a year or so out, but perhaps we'll see that retrofitted into node as well.
It will be more interesting to see how the landscape changes in 5 years - though, obviously, node is still going to be prevalent.
I haven't found a straightforward way of using extensions to SQLite, for example, and unfortunately I don't have the time to implement one myself.
And to be honest even with the addition of realms, npm support etc. [1], I'm still not quite sure if Deno is only a more elegantly designed, less adopted version of Node that's trying to fix something which ain't really all that broken.