Yeah, this tracks with what I've seen. Switched a Go service to Node once and the "better dx" argument evaporated the moment we hit production edge cases nobody had hit yet.
For hobby stuff, stick with what you know well. Node/Deno ecosystem is mature enough that startup time isn't your bottleneck. Bun's genuinely nice for certain things (CLI tools, build steps) but you're right that ecosystem friction is real. Libraries break in weird ways when they hit Bun's quirks.
What actually matters for hobby projects: can you deploy it easily, understand it in 6 months, and will someone help you debug it at 2am. Node checks those boxes. Bun doesn't yet.
ML engineer working on LLMs and RAG pipelines