And it's a shame. I wish there were more of these big companies that would just, idk, pay an organization like Apache or in this case OpenJS so that they can operate as a software development and open source stewardship company, pay people to work and manage these projects.
Sending it off to the Apache foundation in this state to me sends a signal that it's good enough, innovation is no longer required, and therefore is not worth the investment to continue to maintain.
The former is table stakes if it has any chance of displacing test frameworks which are already widely used for both server and client code. I would be shocked if it’s an issue though, there’s very little to gain from coupling a test framework to Node specifics (its own non-test APIs, V8 bindings, NAPI, etc) unless you’re heavily invested in that focus. (I say this as someone who’s worked on such a project off and on for a while, and even then the primary motivation is to make testing itself more portable without sacrificing performance or tooling.)
The latter—attractiveness as a low level API to build on—remains to be seen. This is something Node generally does well with its novel APIs. But it’s a very crowded space already. And from what I’ve seen looking at the APIs, they don’t offer a whole lot more than basic correctness that can be skipped to quickly prototype and iterate abstraction ideas.
Otherwise it’ll be a reasonable default for very Node-specific greenfield projects. Which is welcome! But it’s also a somewhat niche audience. Portability is going to matter to almost all Node users already, and abstraction will matter to a largely overlapping segment of users who are accustomed to a much richer set of built in and extensible testing semantics.
I don’t want to dismiss the effort or its prospects outright! I just think it’s become increasingly clear that Node’s influence relative to the JS ecosystem is shrinking as the diversity of runtimes increases and as compatibility between them becomes more important.