Start off by doing things the deno-"native" way and it's very fun. Most or all of the js tooling woes go away. It starts as just a .ts file that works. I love it for small CLI utilities. There are some quirks[0] but it's well designed UX overall.
Stuff like node stdlib support is a necessary evil for some things. Like sharp (libvips binding) and nestjs didnt work at all before that iirc. And alternatives a lot of work to make.