The author was on here claiming it was an experiment just last week. Didn't look like they have been planning much of this, but they did have some trouble with zig to the tune of having to maintain their own fork that the zig maintainers didn't want to merge. So people probably could have seen this coming

If I was the bun maintainers I wouldn't want to have to maintain a language fork either, when there are viable alternatives.

Now with LLM's getting stronger and stronger a rewrite like this is getting more and more viable, and it looks like they are just approaching this like the "how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time"-method.

Not sure why people thing this is an elaborate PR campaign, we already know LLM's are increasingly powerful for coding tasks.