I loved Elm, and it's disappointing it never achieved critical mass. We wrote a few front-ends with it about 6 years ago. Very easy to write, debug, and deploy
Me too. It’s one of the big “could’ve been” in my opinion.
Though I’m convinced it didn’t reach critical mass purely because of community management issues mentioned in the post. Too many people just threw their hands in the air and divested from Elm because of it. Not everybody wrote a blog post about it.
While those community management issues probably didn't help, I don't think Elm's failure to break out can be placed purely on their shoulders.
The big reason why it - and all the other typed/functional compile to JS languages (PureScript, Reason, etc.) - remained niche is because TypeScript came along. It integrated with the ecosystem more seamlessly, was instantly comfortable for JS devs, and was backed by MS who gave it first-class support in VSCode. Arguably TypeScript is not as good as those other languages, but none of them are better enough to overcome those network effects.
