I think, even though I can absolutely see the arguments for doing so, locking down the compiler to no longer accept external native extensions was a huge mistake community wise, since a lot of the people advocating for Elm were the sort of early adopter who really really wants an escape hatch because they're in the habit of getting into situations where they need one no matter what tools they're using.

Certainly that describes me, and when all the people who seemed to be like me got told to go sit on a cactus by the Elm core developers and bailed out to work with something else, my experiments got pretty much immediately shelved and Elm moved into the "interesting place to steal ideas from, actively hostile to my actually using it" category.

This may be unfair, but I'm pretty sure it's a reasonable description of what -did- happen, fair or not.

Except for the compiler bugs, lack of self hosted package management, improvements to tooling, etc. I use it regularly too, but it is frustrating to see it in a state of decay.

They can definitely claim the above points and more are not goals, and Evan absolutely has every right to do so. But don’t be surprised when devs see it as dead.