As a counter-anecdote, I came to OCaml skeptically in late 2018, having previously done significant work in Haskell, Clojure[Script], and Java. I got up and running very quickly, and IMO compared to those other three languages/platforms, OCaml tooling is only worse/more difficult than Java's.
Yeah, it's really unfortunate. Dune and Esy are moving things forward, but you sorta have to know the ecosystem quite well to figure that out.
Do you have a reference to the up-to-date guide that you'd recommend to get started in the OCaml ecosystem? The one that would cover editor integration (VIM/Emacs), build system, standard and essential libraries to use, etc.