It was not built around any of that. It was built to facilitate compiler construction and add some introspection to that process. The problem is that building what is a compile and code generation library to cover multiple languages and multiple architectures is really hard. Abstractions start to get leaky. Next thing you know there are a bunch of assumptions and hacks that make you neat library a big ol’ mess.

I’m not faulting any of the llvm maintainers. Other people were hoping the IR and library bits would turn into more than a compiler toolkit. Unfortunately, reality sets in over time.