I was enthusiastic when D first came out, but....
1. dmd was (iirc) free to use but closed source and I vaguely recall having a lot of issues with it. Later other compilers came along but dmd was the official one that defined the language so they always lagged behind. So, very dependent on the fate of Digital Mars which is a small company.
2. two memory management models in one language. Most libs require GC, so you have the complexity of a core lang that tries to be agnostic but an ecosystem that doesn't really help you use that.
3. no IDEs or tooling to speak of
4. two totally different standard libs with no agreement on which to use and neither all that great
So, why use it instead of Java? Quite unclear.
I've noticed the exact phenomena you're describing on both here and reddit, where people will gush all over a famous person for their accomplishments until it becomes known that they espouse anything other than woke liberal orthodoxy.