What happened was essentially bullies. I think it is apparent now that the library and, more importantly, the idea of a data first neural network architecture in javascript isn't going away.

What do you mean by "data-first"? What other forms could a JS NN architecture take?

A lot of neural networks start by first constructing the neural network structure, and eventually getting around to running the data through it. Where in brain.js, line 2 in most examples (just after instantiation) is train with data.