alt Hacker NewsI'm not deeply involved in the community, but I know people who were, and my understanding is the removal of custom infix operators lost a lot of community support. Very popular feature removed specifically because the creator of the language didn't like it, and despite large community cries for it to remain.
In my eyes, it was probably the right decision technically, but deeply unpopular and probably the wrong decision socially.
Not exactly removed, the feature was still there, but could be used only if your module was in Elm namespace (the compiler checked). It was kind of a "no soup for you" situation, which bothered me.
Elm served its purpose for me - an example of a small language with great tooling and error messages. And the strictness was helpful in learning to do things the "proper" way in the Elm model, even if I did reach for escape hatches in later projects. E.g. writing a notion-like application in Elm, I had to walk through my data twice - once to render it and another time to collect cache misses. With hyperapp, I broke purity a little and accumulated the information on the side.