[tomphoolery]

Deno's progress on NPM compatibility may have accelerated due to how BunJS was received, but yes I believe this idea has been baking for a while in the Deno world. It was always somewhat of a concern when Deno was launched, but the team was just more focused on delivering a solid core product before they started worrying about the ancillary tasks. After all, you can always use the various Deno-friendly CDNs to use a Deno-compatible package distributed over NPM.

BunJS does of course have a slightly different use case, packages or apps that still need to make use of Node APIs. I can see a future where we say "if you have an old Node app, you can run it on BunJS with a codemod and get an X% perf boost for free", as well as "if you are starting a new project, just go with Deno because there's less BS to think about".