I author the Cycle.js framework and for a good while I considered it to be a sister project to Elm, because both had a focus on simple functional reactive programming for frontend. I've advocated Elm and been a bit in the community as well.
Evan is great person, I still remember fondly the time we had good long conversations at a conference. I started the first attempt at integrating Elm with React Native, and that was only possible through hacking the native modules in various ways. I figured I couldn't progress with this plan due to how restricted Elm is regarding native modules, but also other things like naming of community modules. Elm is strict not just as a language but also as a community culture.
What shocks me about the latest state of Elm and its community is how easily conversations get locked. Locking should be the last resort. What leaders block or ban indicates what they do not want to risk. There should always be the possibility of blocking to say that "we cannot afford having X in our community." and defend some basic principles.
In many communities, X is just personal attacks or harassment, that kind of thing. The consistent pattern I see in the Elm community management is that X is dissent. "We cannot risk having divergent discussions (polite or impolite) in our community" is message that restricts thought freedom and reinforces cult-like behavior. It's not a good thing to have in a community, specially in an open one on the internet where membership is fluid (unlike dissent in a company for example). Curbing dissent ultimately leads to lack of innovation (which comes from freedom to create without fear of rejection), which reinforces the status of the leader as the primary source of innovation, because whatever the leader does is assumed to be never rejected. I think these community dynamics are bad in the long run, it creates more feeling of rejection, decreases innovation, and centralizes even more responsibility and power to the BDFL.