Node won server-side JS by being first. Then the guy who built it got on stage and apologised for it. Then a 22-year-old rewrote it in a language most JS devs never heard of and claimed 3x the speed. Then Deno - after years of being ideologically pure - quietly added node_modules support and nobody talked about it.

This talk is the story of how we ended up with three competing JS runtimes, what each one is actually betting on, and why the ending isn't a winner - it's a boring standard that might matter more than all of them.