The problem with reason-cli is that it can get out of sync with the bs-platform version and fail in unclear ways.
There was quite a bit of pushback against reason at my shop due to the interop between these two packages and trying to do things like have autocompletion fail because of them.
It’d be nice if the upgrade of bucklescript to the OCaml 4.6 drops soon too.
1) Until recently we didn't have better alternatives for BuckleScript based projects (but then Reason Language Server came along)
2) We didn't have a good way to quickly install per-project dependencies for the Reason Native workflow. But then we built esy for native workflows which makes it very fast to install large dependencies across multiple projects by using a relocatable immutable package build cache.
Now, there's much less reason to use a global install and global installs will always have the problem of conflicting with project dependencies. I think you're picking up on that fact. Here's to the sandboxed project future!
This kind of stuff is often discussed in the Discord ReasonML channel so if you're ever curious to read the pulse on the direction of dev tools, feel free to join the discussion.