> Were people forced to use elm prior to a 1.0 release or something?

Obviously not, but for a short while it felt like Elm evangelization was everywhere.

Ironically, the small group pushing it so hard at the company I was with at the time were arguing that it was very stable and production ready, despite being pre-1.0.

That argument switched for the 0.19 release, when it was argued that it was still early and changing a lot.

The argument switched again when they didn't make any progress for 7 years, which was supposed to be a sign that it was highly stable and mature.

> There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.

Fully agree, but there's also room for opinions of people using the project. When a project encourages adoption and then pulls the rug out from under actual users, it's also okay for those users to be upset.

That's one thing the Elm project disagreed with. They had drama where even contributors were being handed 7-day bans for innocuous things like talking about native modules after the decision had been made to move away from them. Their subreddit was the kind of place ruled with an iron fist where any post that wasn't completely Elm-positive would be disappeared. There wasn't any room for disagreement in the Elm community and it partially collapsed on them when they pushed it too far.