deno has been around for a little while, i think some commentators may have taken your responses as satirical because of how often deno shows up in conversations surrounding the web platform. think of deno as a node.js successor, it's a separate javascript runtime; with that, it'll need to compete with node's ecosystem (vast and diverse tooling). the deno company is spearheading that movement by creating things like Deno Deploy and now Fresh. i believe the gist of it is that people were excited about the concepts Deno had been brewing up, and now they're building things that will allow people to actually make use of deno.

so, many people will look at this and say 'how is this different from ___?' and the reality is that for the most part, it's not. that's the point. you're making use of deno to do the same thing you did with node, and hopefully it's a little bit easier and/or more developer friendly.

also fwiw, deno is not really yc-affiliated; the company is backed by Sequoia, Four Rivers Ventures, Rauch Capital, Long Journey Ventures, the Mozilla Corporation, Shasta Ventures, and i think some other angel investors like Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO).