While it is sad, I can't help but agree. I've spent many, many years working with Node and tried picking up Deno recently. The small cuts quickly add up where getting even some of the official examples to work takes effort because they're ever so slightly out of date and things have changed in the interim.
On the other hand there are dozens of us who don't like node.js, managed to stay away, and kinda like deno.
I remember when the project started. I believe that the ability to learn the language as quickly as he did, get the feedback required and iterating quickly helped a lot! All of this was possible with Zig. People are amazing and great inspiration, it's not sad at all.