I would agree with you in the case of a mass market design where you're competing with a major CPU player. And while that gets the most attention in the tech media, it's actually a somewhat small portion of the market. it's important to keep in mind that a large portion of the semiconductor (VLSI, digital design) market is chips that perform auxiliary tasks. Things like networking equipment controllers, Storage device controllers, and connectivity device controllers like Bluetooth, USB, and whatnot. Those designs all have CPUs in them, but performance is not as critical as something like a Ryzen CPU or an i7. Unit volumes can be lower for these chips as well, and there is definitely a lot of value to be gained by a lowered development costs, which this aims to do.

While I'm not claiming that this is a perfect implementation, the VLSI design world is definitely ripe for newer, higher level, and more open source design languages and tools. There will always be performance critical designs that lower level languages will be useful for, similarly how there will always be performance critical code that will be written in C/C++ and assembly.

And yes, I'm aware of most of the alternative HDLs, and open source EDA tools out there, and I have varying opinions about them. I understand the limitations of building hardware and why we do things the way we do. But I think it's incredibly naive to think that we can't apply more mindsets from software engineering to hardware engineering. We just happen to be in a market where good hardware engineers can get paid more as a software engineer. I call this out because I get the push back from so many people in my industry, and they sound like (what I would imagine) Autodesk developers sound like when Blender gets brought up in a conversation.