They answered this at the end of the article: “The Deno company hopes to enable the millions of web programmers out there to maximally leverage their craft in other domains.”
It takes time to learn an ecosystem, and when people know one ecosystem and not another, most people would rather do high skill, high value work in the ecosystem they know than start over as a noob in a new one.
The only thing unique about the web / JavaScript land is its ubiquity and size due to its place as the language of the browser. So anyone who can make an abstraction that lets JavaScript developers do stuff outside the browser without learning much new has a virtually guaranteed large audience of developers who are likely to think “I would love to be able to build X, I just don’t have time to learn a new ecosystem.” Those folks are then thrilled to dive in and use the new abstraction. And there are a lot of those people. And that’s why we are all stuck using Electron apps for so much stuff. :)
But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Electron can evolve to be less of a resource hog, and better alternatives are being tested all the time. The same is true for other non-browser applications of JavaScript.
I don’t know if this vision is reality, but I think that it may be that we’re in the early days of a transition toward the browser stack being the new “GUI.” Which is to say, back in the 80s there was a lot of debate around GUIs and whether they were a good idea etc., and while most people liked them to some degree, they also lamented the idea of losing the command line. But in the end, GUIs didn’t shrink the number of CLI tools in the world, rather they increased the size of the domain that computers are used for my making it more accessible to more people. I think that so far the web vs native debate seems to be following a similar trajectory.