> If a Deno library uses a Node API or an npm library somewhere, it can be entirely encapsulated, so you might not even notice until you see it in a stack trace. That doesn’t seem very intrusive?

Node API yes, NPM library no. If you add a dependency on a library that uses NPM you now depend on an entire web of transitive NPM dependencies, with all of the problems that entails. People don't dislike NPM because it's aesthetically displeasing—you can't just abstract away the problems with NPM. The ecosystem causes real problems with real software, and Deno initially recognized those real problems and set out to reset the ecosystem.

The only way in which NPM-compat is different than colored functions is that there's no static compiler feature telling you when you've added a dependency on a bunch of NPM libraries.