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.