This mirrors my experience quite perfectly.
To add another aspect: The over-management of GitHub issues is, in my experience, borderline pathological.
On dozens of occasions (no exaggeration), I've experienced the following:
- I notice some bug, or some missing functionality.
- After dozens of searches I finally find a relevant Github issue. It's difficult to find because it's closed, in a project with a different, former name to the current version of the package, and part of a now-defunct GH organisation.
- The only comment on the issue was Evan saying the issue is being folded into some meta issue bundling "issues concerning ". He closes the issue and adds a line into the meta issue.
- Any discussion of individual items on the meta-issue is blocked
- Work on that collection of issues is not going to happen "right now" because "it's so much more efficient to work on sets of related issues".
- 14 months or so later, some work is done on . The issue is closed (& locked)
- My original issue obviously persists
Evan seems to consider open issues as accusations or personal failures, or otherwise I can't understand why this is happening. When some recent version broke the existing support for WebSockets, the issue was immediately closed (making it, again, invisible to people experiencing this problem and searching with default options).
The most constant output of Elm leadership are long-winded essays explaining how, specifically, you're stupid. You don't get to use WebSockets. We could merge this patch fixing the problem, but anyone could do that. It's just code, after all, and "Code is Easy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSjbTC-hvqQ). Have you heard about XY problems? It's a great concept that neatly explains why you are the problem, not us.
I really liked Elm. I would (have) loved to see it succeed. I fully understand that small, young projects come with limitations, that it may take a long time to fix some issue, that backward-compatibility may be broken, etc. Not once have I complained about some issue, Elm or otherwise, not being fixed fast enough. And on the few occasions where I witnessed such a sense of entitlement, I called them out on it.
But the defensiveness of Elm Core to whatever they perceive as hostility has somehow led directly from "benevolent dictator" to this weird kiddy version of Stalinism, where everyone is always upbeat, and "constructive", and prefacing even totally valid questions with five paragraphs of Dear-Leader praise and caveats about probably just being really stupid, lest they trigger the benevolent ego.
I'm just really happy I never used Elm for work projects. I imagine trying to get something fixed when it really matters is a lot like getting ventilators to blue states these days.