My (likely unfair) impression of D is that it feels a bit rudderless: It is trying to be too many things to too many people, and as a consequence it doesn't really stand out compared to the languages that commit to a paradigm.

Do you want GC? Great! Do not want GC? Well, you can turn it off, and lose access to most things. Do you want a borrow-checker? Great, D does that as well, though less wholeheartedly than Rust. Do you want a safer C/memory safety? There's the SafeD mode. And probably more that I forget.

I wonder if all these different (often incompatible) ways of using D ends up fragmenting the D ecosystem, and in turn make it that much harder for it to gain critical mass