What’s wrong with node? Genuine question

Nothing. Bun is just smaller and faster and comes with a built-in package manager, test runner, bundler, SQL engine, image processor etc..

It's 1/2 baked in everything it tries to do.

You need a "separate" tool called npm to install packages. It's dead slow so they added corepack. Another extra tool. Then you use it to install yarn or pnpm. Another extra tool. It might still be slower than bun...

In the past you need to transpile typescript with other tools. It can only run js out of the box. The later fix was a wasm build, which means slower than it could be. Another 1/2 job.

Many more examples in many areas but anything Node tries to do itself feels 1/2 baked.

Bun and Deno are faster than Node because it is a 1/2 job at its core. It has v8. It has the tools. It could be done but no. It did nothing for years until Deno and Bun came on the scene to nudge it.

I think npm install can be very very slow on large projects. Think minutes.

From the perspective of someone trying to package nodejs, building it is a complete dumpster fire. GYP (generate your projects) is a now defunct and poorly thought out build tool that node heavily relies on with it's native C/C++ modules. Cross compiling is completely broken and I am honestly surprised it builds reliability for the native target.