Even if Bun didn't have a better performance story, I would evaluate switching to it to reduce project complexity.
Great tools have knock on effects. Good dependency managers improve the ecosystem. Fast language servers can enable interactive dev style. And so on…
Rust/Cargo is the one I was most impressed by. But I haven't done any significant work in Rust.
Deno promised "Node", but done a second time the right way (Typescript, new APIs, new package manager, etc). Which is not an entirely new language / platform, but different enough that you have to buy into the Deno vision.
They actively fought against being Node at all for a long time, & differentiated themselves in being much much less, no package.json at all. Only recently has Deno gotten deep Node intercompatibility, after years of trying to leave that shit behind & finally giving in to the needs to be part of the vast npm externality.
The general principle has & still is evident. It's not totally picture perfect rosy - there's lots of pieces missing - but Deno's http serving for example uses standard w3c Request Response objects used by Fetch & Service Worker. https://deno.land/api@v1.36.4?s=Deno.serveHttp
But more so, things like typescript & formatting come out of the box & are crazy fast/just work.
These problems keep recurring. Every time I start a small library, yes, I know I'll make it through, eventually. But I feel lessened by the battle. Compromises are made.
I personally feel little enjoyment for configuring build chains. A good fraction for the packages I download have people that made cute interesting personal decisions about how to package stuff - since there is no guidance & no standard - that clashes & conflicts with everything else. Or is distributed as es2015 cjs. Other people's ability to choose, their ability to like configuring their build actively impedes the general flow.
Most people dont get the web platform compat. But unjs, cloudflare workers, and dozens of others are just amazing lovely platforms that work so well, and which are often fairly cross portable with little lift. It's fine that you are happy in your niche, but having actual well adopted interoperable protocols has let some really interesting pick & choose futures start to emerge, and it's where the early adopters are. It's where the good stuff is formenting. You don't have to be there now, you can stay in your zone, but is is growing, and it's because of wintercg interoperability efforts all centered around growing web platform ideas outward.
The packaging situation is indeed messed up but that’s because TC39 decided to invent a maximally incompatible new module format. But you can not install CJS packages in Node just as well as you can not install them in Deno.
I don’t find configuring build systems enjoyable, but the benefit is that your dev environment is not tightly coupled. If your runtime is also your build system then there’s one tool doing two jobs. Some people might like this. I personally think that this kind of coupling causes more inconvenience over the long-term even if there’s less inconvenience up front.