It's a fascinating experiment. A language that's actually a single developer's walled garden, where they make all the decisions, write all the code, and personally vet every library. (There must be other languages where the language team devs hvae to individually approve every package before allowing it to be added to the package manager, but I certainly haven't run across it before!)

It's quite enjoyable to watch, but obviously it's not scalable or sustainable in the general case.

> Elm's management has left me with the impression of a really smart, well-intentioned hellscape.

That seems fair, yes.

My personal view is that there's about a 90% chance the project will collapse under its own weight before it ever hits a release and becomes a normal project, but there's a 10% chance it'll (one day) migrate into a real language (with a real governance model, an actual team working on it, bugfixes being shipped, etc.).