I wonder about the timing in relation to the OpenAI acquisition of Astral this week. Was it a two-horse race to be acquired and then Deno got word that they were not the chosen one, and so said oh well, mass layoff it is?

BTW the Deno architects would contend that "mastering Deno" could never be a waste of time, because what you're mastering is to a large extent standards-based JS (in comparison to the APIs that came before).