To me Deno died the day it decided to not support npm packages and died again when it started supporting it.
Ironically the reason why I hated it when it was introduced was the reason why they added support for npm (i.e. absolute URLs don't support semver and therefore you will load multiple versions)
Once Deno's direction became clear, success seemed unlikely.
In what way does supporting npm packages compromise Deno's design? I don't know a lot about Deno but thought it was more about rewriting in Rust, more batteries included like native TS support, and more secure defaults.