By the way, can anyone suggest a good zero-to-Elm tutorial/course/book/whatever for people with no web frontend experience (coming from desktop GUI dev) to get on board with Elm web GUI apps development quickly?
Though absolutely no web frontend experience might prove difficult. I think you can get pretty far with just learning Elm but it is not a common case that is well supported by any learning material I am aware of.
For general Elm stuff this site helped my quite a lot: https://elmprogramming.com/
There isn't that much good learning material. It is important to get comfortable with the official docs. Especially the standard library that you find here: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/ (Yeah, the standard library is the core package. This is where you find the fundamental building blocks. When I first learned Elm it took me way too much time until I figured it should look under packages.)
https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/reason-town/elm-to-ocam...
I'm not saying to avoid Elm. It's a beautiful language that makes UI programming fun. Just don't put 6 months of nights and weekends trying to learn it like I did for a big side project without understanding these constraints.
It just doesn't have the churn that plagues the rest of JS-world.
Elm is an absolute dictatorship but that is hardly that unique in the programming language world. There is also Gren https://gren-lang.org/ if you want to have a (probably?) more open fork.
But, yes Elm is a language build for very specific purposes with very strong opinions about how it should be used. If you have a project that fits the use case it will be awesome otherwise just don't.
For far as books are concerned, Elm in Action by Richard Feldman and Programming Elm: Build Safe and Maintainable Front-End Applications by Jeremy Fairbank.
Best of luck on your journey!